


Love Bites

by KathrynShadow



Series: Love Bites [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Harley Quinn (2017), Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Canon Continuation, Canon-Typical Violence, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Constipation, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Consent, F/M, Follows Batman & Harley Quinn if you're getting specific, Friends With Benefits, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Negotiation, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Taking Prescribed Painkillers When You Get Your Shoulder Dislocated Like A Reasonable Person, The Joker was an asshole and no one is surprised, Villains to Civilians to Heroes, implied pegging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:05:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 54,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: So, she reasons, the guy behaved himself for two months. Maybe she can see what happens after a second time.Except she has no direct way of contacting him. And hewon'tcontact her. And there's no chance in hell that she'll try and find Batman and ask if he'd mind letting his adopted son know that there was an ex-supervillain wanting to do terrible things to his frankly incredible ass. No one is that brave.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I started shipping this for unrelated other-fic-in-the-works reasons about a month before the film came out, found that there were about 4 things in the whole universe for the pairing, despaired mightily, and then had a series of "did I just fall asleep in the theater and vividly hallucinate" moments about the actual movie.
> 
> This is the result.
> 
> Title blatantly stolen from Halestorm's "Love Bites (So Do I)" and then edited because actually straight-up naming it after the song felt weird. Related: I just want to thank Halestorm for half of the contents of the playlist I made while writing this.

Harley isn't sure what kind of one-night stand Nightwing is gonna be when they part ways. She has the instinctive, if pessimistic, assumption that he's one of those that starts _thinking_ things after it's all said and done, that he might start actually trying to talk to her from time to time just because. The fact that they ended up in very close quarters and an ongoing Tense Situation for a day or so afterwards doesn't help with that assumption, either.

But he doesn't call. Not that he could without breaking a _lot_ of boundaries and a few laws, but he's a cute little Batman clone in enough ways that it wouldn't surprise her. And hey, as much as he withered under Batman’s Disappointed Dad Stare, it might not stop him from calling in a favor just to, _ahem_ , check on her.

But, again, none of that happens. It actually makes her a little antsy, in a weird way. (She implied a boundary to somebody and it's actually being respected? Without her needing to suplex the guy first? That's the real madness here.)

Two months pass with no word—except from her parole officer, who left a note in her _deeply unofficial_ mailbox that he shouldn't have even known about, saying that Batman had vouched for her after all and they were willing to let her absence slide as a result. But… but it was still no word from _Nightwing_. And that was weird, right?

Right?

And then she really does run out of batteries. Even after she cannibalizes a flashlight and a remote for a TV that the previous tenant took with them. So, she reasons, the guy behaved himself for two months. Maybe she can see what happens after a second time.

Except she has no direct way of contacting him. And he _won't_ contact her. And there's no chance in hell that she'll try and find Batman and ask if he'd mind letting his adopted son know that there was an ex-supervillain wanting to do terrible things to his frankly incredible ass. No one is that brave. And also it wouldn't work.

Her next day off, Harley packs three cans of spray paint and gets onto the train to Blüdhaven.

* * *

Nightwing is somewhat startled to find, during the course of an otherwise uneventful patrol, a message spray-painted onto the roof of an apartment building just a few streets from his own.

 _CALL ME,_ it says, in alternating red and black. Beneath it, in the same color scheme, is a phone number with a Gotham area code. And a crudely-drawn facsimile of Nightwing’s own sigil, the blue stark against the rest of the message.

“Huh,” he says.

* * *

He's lucky she assumes he'll have found a way to kill his caller ID or she would have just let him go to her shitty, broken voicemail. “Hello?” she snaps, suspicious anyway.

A pause. “You know, I hear vandalism is the gateway drug to world domination attempts,” Nightwing says, his voice lightly amused.

Harley rolls her eyes. “Very funny,” she says. “I have a job, y'know. I can't sit on a rooftop all night waitin’ for you to ask me why I'm up there.” She puts her free hand on her hip and scowls at her fridge, willing it to sprout food she doesn't have to cook. “And in case ya didn't notice, you didn't leave me many ways to get your attention without a giant bat glarin’ at me.”

“I figured you'd ask if you wanted one,” he answers.

She hates it when people are reasonable at her. “Hmph,” she says.

Nightwing waits for her to continue, then clears his throat awkwardly when she doesn’t. “So,” he says. “I called you. What do you need?”

She stays silent for a solid five seconds just so that he can really contemplate what he just said. “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

“Uh,” says Nightwing. “No…?” Harley hears a faint, exasperated sigh on the other side of the call. “I just didn’t want to assume anything after you made yourself clear last time.”

She rolls her eyes hard enough that he can maybe actually hear it. “Start assumin’. When can you get here?”

He mutters something she can't quite catch. It must not be _too_ grouchy, though, because when he speaks up again all he says is: “Maybe two hours, depending on traffic.”

Harley considers this. “Works for me,” she answers, shrugging as if he can see it. “Ooh, can you grab something to eat on the way? I'm dyin’ over here.”

“Don't push your luck, Harley,” Nightwing says, but his tone is all teasing.

* * *

Two hours and twelve minutes later, there’s a knock in exactly the _opposite_ direction from her door. Harley jerks up from her contemplation of how much laundry she could potentially shove into one machine and gives the window a Look.

She didn’t exactly clean up _last_ time, but he wasn’t exactly coming over on purpose last time either, so she kicks her dirty clothes under her bed. Even though he can absolutely see her doing it, and that kind of defeats the purpose of fake-cleaning up, it makes her feel better dammit so she’s going to do it.

And then she walks over to the window, unlocks it, and—with a little bit of effort because the damn thing sticks like a motherfucker—pushes it open. All while maintaining eye contact, because this is _dumb_.

“Hey,” Nightwing says. He almost moves as though to assist, but appears to have developed some sort of complex about helping Harley open things after the Batmobile door, so his hand drops back to his side.

“You know,” Harley says, putting her shoulder under the windowframe and shoving it until it jerks all the way up all at once, “I _have_ a door.”

“Sorry,” he replies, not sounding it at all. “I have a crippling allergy to stairs and front doors. Runs in the family.”

“That’s funny.” Harley puts her hands on her hips and looks at him dubiously, stepping back so he can figure his way into her _goddamned window_ without making an idiot of himself. “Batman didn’t have a problem with it.”

He actually manages it. He makes it look _graceful_. That jerk. “I’m adopted.” Nightwing brushes off some paint flakes from the dilapidated windowsill and holds out a plastic bag that she… hadn’t noticed he had. On account of the window thing.

Harley takes the offering and peers inside. Box of condoms—neat; she’s pretty sure that she couldn’t get pregnant if she _wanted_ to after all of the experimental chemicals she’s been doused in by dint of her old social circle, and she’s on birth control anyway just because she hates it when her ovaries decide to mix it up and say hi and she _can’t_ plan for it in advance, but she definitely doesn’t see the harm in tripling up. Nameless paper bag with a burger and fries in it—oh, hell yes.

“I got hungry,” Nightwing says almost defensively, rubbing the back of his neck. “And I figured this was easier than getting the crap kicked out of me for eating on the way.”

Half of the fries are already in her mouth, so she gives him a thumbs up instead. There’s something else in the bag, though; she digs for it while she chews and swallows her potato bribe, and discovers…

“Oh,” she says quietly, bringing out the little pack of AA batteries with her free hand and cradling it to her chest. “Aww, Nightwing… you really do care.”

He grins. “Seemed like a safe bet,” he says. “Let me know if you need different ones. ...if we ever want to do this again, I mean,” Nightwing is quick to add.

Harley sets the bag and its contents aside with utmost care, takes him by the shoulders since she knows from previous experience there are absolutely _no_ handholds on his suit, and kisses him ferociously. He only tenses up for a second at the suddenness of it, and he’s just as quick as she is to escalate, pulling her lower lip into his mouth, his hands gliding to her sides so he can slip them under the hem of her shirt. She bites his tongue and he exhales shakily into her mouth, fingers tightening on her hips for just a second before he starts sliding them up her ribs.

“What, not gonna buy me a drink first?” Harley says, cracking her eyes open.

Nightwing pulls back just far enough to give her a completely flat look. “You kicked me in the face and duct taped me to your bed,” he says. “Maybe that was _your_ idea of foreplay, but—” He falters. “And okay, maybe a little bit of mine, but… I’m pretty sure sex is better without a concussion, and… I’m not sure what my point was.”

Harley decides to consider that a victory and starts trying to figure out how his suit goes together. She _knows_ it’s a two-piece deal, he gave her very detailed instructions on how to take it off before he got frustrated and she let him break himself out of the tape, but she just can’t… find the damn seam where his pants end and his shirt starts.

“ _Now_ who’s getting ahead of themselves?” Nightwing mutters under his breath, pulling one hand out from under her shirt to guide her to one of his freakin’ ninja hems. She digs her fingers into it before she can lose it again, rolls his pants down a couple of inches so she will absolutely know where it is. He busies himself with her neck, nosing just below her ear before kissing down to her shoulder, his free hand sliding up her spine and pulling her close. Harley makes a tiny, frustrated noise, because this is going to make it _really_ hard to get his shirt off, but he bites her neck and does something absurd with his tongue and at that point it’s a little harder to care.

Harley gives up on his shirt for the time being, peeling his pants down as far as she can reach—which is about midway down his thighs, but he’s getting distracted with rucking her shirt up so he’s no help. It at least gives her the chance to pull his briefs down too and gratuitously grab his ass.

“I’m so glad you ditched the cape,” she says dreamily. “I _never_ knew you were hiding this from me.”

Nightwing laughs, his hands moving back down her body, accompanied by the tug of fabric settling back into place. “Vigilante justice has its perks.”

“Yeah?” Harley asks. “So does vigilante mayhem. And vigilante waitressing when the vigilante justice follows you home.” He’s pulled back and has started grinning at her _way_ more widely than the current situation really warrants. She narrows her eyes at him. “What.”

Wordlessly, Nightwing holds her bra up. It’s one of those cheap convertible ones and he’s _dissected_ it, unhooking both straps and the band like the filthiest pickpocket of all time, slipping it off of her without taking her shirt off _and_ without her noticing. She’s a little turned on by that, if she’s honest. She’s also a little pissed off by the smug look he’s giving her about it.

“They teach you how to do that in ninja vigilante school?” Harley asks suspiciously.

He snickers. “Well, not _that_ usage, but the skills… yeah.”

She tries to kiss the smirk off his face. It doesn’t work.

“By the way,” she says, not to change the subject or anything, “I know I put my number on a rooftop, but if I end up getting a bunch of randos from Blüdhaven…”

“Don’t worry,” Nightwing assures her, discarding her bra and peeling his shirt off for her. (She makes an appreciative noise, although she does note with some annoyance the fading bruise across one side of his ribs. She’s gonna have to avoid that.) “I painted over it. Next person who sees it won’t get anything.”

“A little bird—” and he’s already rolling his eyes the second the joke is out of her mouth— “told me that that leads to world domination,” she says sweetly, dragging a fingernail down his chest. His breath hitches when it reaches his nipple, but if it’s pain-related he doesn’t seem to mind it all that much. “Havin’ any urges to conquer countries?”

“Mm,” he says, pretending to consider it as he hooks his fingers into her waistband and pulls it down. (So she changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt the second she got home from work. Big deal. It _clearly_ isn’t having any effect on her sex life, so the judgy cliches about it can go fuck themselves.) “Maybe Canada. It sounds pretty nice.”

“Sounds pretty cold,” she says. She tugs at a pinch of his unfairly skintight trousers for dramatic effect. “Don’t think it’d agree with you.”

“Suit’s warmer than it looks,” he says, pulling her shirt off on the second attempt (because he didn’t warn her first, so she didn’t think to raise her arms on the first one) and starting to walk them back towards the bed. “Window,” he explains, before she can start pouting at his rather abrupt takeover of the situation. “Sure, all the other buildings around here are probably condemned too, but I like to be careful.”

Harley quirks an eyebrow, but accepts the situation for what it is. She at least swings him around at the last second so he hits the mattress first, though. “If anyone’s there, they’ve already seen your ass,” she points out. “You gonna take your mask off this time?”

“I’m pretty sure Batman would know if I did,” Nightwing says, undoing his boots before finally letting her help tug the rest of his clothes off. “And I’m _absolutely_ sure he would come here to lecture me as soon as possible. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not be interrupted by my father breaking in. ...again.”

Yeah, he’s got a point there. She grumbles anyway, moving forward as he moves back so that she can straddle him on top of her unmade bed. “It’s not like I’d immediately know who you were or anything,” she says. “I mean, with his I get it, but yours?” Harley taps the surface of the stylized mask with a fingertip. “What, am I not s’posed to recognize somebody just because they’ve got somethin’ over their eyes?”

Nightwing laughs, stretching up to kiss her before moving his hands and his mouth to her breasts instead. “You’d be surprised,” he says, gently rolling his thumb over a nipple.

She tries to snort her opinion of that, but a wire gets crossed when his tongue comes into play and it ends up coming out as a gaspy noise instead. “Right,” she says, and then doesn’t say much of anything else for a while.

* * *

You  
[11.38 AM] This thing text too or is it just a walkytalky with a phone number

Battery Supplier  
[11.42 AM] it also slices tomatoes and unfolds into a raft.  
[11.43 AM] do I want to know what I’m saved as?

You  
[11.44 AM] _Attachment: 00087.png_

Battery Supplier  
[11.46 AM] could be worse.

You  
[11.47 AM] Well I was gonna save you as dick at first

Battery Supplier  
[11.53 AM] ?

You  
[11.55 AM] Bc thats what your for

Battery Supplier  
[11.55 AM] you’re*

You  
[11.55 AM] Damn it

Battery Supplier  
[11.56 AM] :]  
[11.56 AM] fair enough. why change it?

You  
[11.59 AM] This is funnier  
[12.03 PM] _Attachment: 00088.png_

Battery Supplier  
[12.05 PM] I get “Boss Guy” and “Parole :c”...  
[12.06 PM] do I want to know about Cat Ex-Neighbor?

You  
[12.08 PM] Nope

* * *

Harley keeps waiting for Nightwing to slip up on some level and he keeps not doing it. Her first experimental text does open the door to occasional conversation, and even sometimes conversation that he starts himself, but he’s not saying hi every morning or sending her nudes. Which… not that she’d _mind_ the nudes, even if she’d have to move them somewhere else and then immediately delete any trace of them from her phone for both of their sakes, but the point is that he doesn’t even do that.

He sends her pictures sometimes. Random snapshots of the skyline from angles she is 100% sure are not safe to be in but that _technically_ could just be from over the edge of a particularly well-placed roof. The rooftop where she contacted him, only the number painted over with blue and the rest of the message left intact. His neighbor’s new kitten, gnawing on his bare hand.

That hand is about as close as he ever gets to sending a picture of _himself_.

She really shouldn’t be disappointed about that. It’s a _good_ thing. People might still try to get to the Bat family through her after their last series of stunts, but she sure as shit shouldn’t be making it easy on them by having masturbatory Nightwing blackmail material lying around. So this is fine. Good, even.

Really.

* * *

“So,” Harley says, instead of _hi_ or _how’s it going_ or _sex is pretty fun, huh? Want to try that again sometime?_ “What are you wearing right now?”

Nightwing seems to startle himself into a laugh. “Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

He considers this, but if he has a response he doesn’t say it. “Pants,” he says instead.

“Such a shame,” she says with a (slightly overblown) wistful sigh. Then, hopefully, “ _Just_ pants?”

Nightwing does that thing again where he laughs but tries really hard to pretend it was just a really weird cough. Probably something he picked up from Batman, she thinks. She doesn't know what Bats is like when the cowl’s off, obviously, but when it's on… he just isn't a very giggly dude. “Socks too,” he says.

Harley rolls her eyes. “C’mon, Nightwing,” she wheedles. “Gimme something to work with.”

“They're cotton, I think,” he says. “And the pants are blue jeans with a hole in the left knee.”

She groans. “That's not what I—” Wait. “Wait,” she says. “You're not wearin’ your mask right now, are you?”

“I don't usually watch TV in costume, no,” he says.

Of all the fuckin’ things to manage a thrill darting through her veins, _that's_ what does it. And it's _stupid_ —she knows he takes the costume off; the guy apparently leads a perfectly functional life as whomever he is when he isn't punching people into garbage cans, so he has to. It can't even be the first time they've talked out of costume—he wasn't wearing gloves in the kitten picture, after all…

“...wait,” Nightwing says. “Is _that_ what you're into?”

“Maybe,” she says, more defensively than intended. “Listen, if you'd never seen me outside of my getup, you'd be curious too, okay?”

“Maybe I'm hideous under there,” he teases. Harley hears him shift; she knows he's probably just moving to a more comfortable position on the couch, but she can choose to imagine that it's a completely different rustle of fabric that reaches her ears. “I might start bringing chandeliers down at any second.”

“So you're sayin’ you look like Gerard Butler with a sunburn?”

Nightwing snorts. “Maybe I am.”

Harley considers this. “Nah,” she says. “I couldn't cut myself on _his_ cheekbones.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Harley says dismissively. “Say something sexy already, sheesh.”

“Uh,” says Nightwing. “I’m usually a little more of a hands-on kind of guy,” he hazards.

“You’re a smart man. I’m sure you can improvise.” Harley checks the blinds and wanders across her apartment, flopping down on her bed as if he can see her in the first place.

“If I didn’t know better,” he says, his voice dipping in her ear (he’s finally getting it!), “I’d say you were trying to seduce me out of my secret identity.”

Harley scowls. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m too stupid to think of that?”

“You have a _doctorate_ , Harley. You proved you weren’t stupid before we even met.”

Firstly: Alright, that was a good comeback. She was half expecting him to get thrown off enough by that bit of conclusion-jumping that he’d start digging a hole for himself. (It’s not her fault. She’s just… tired of people assuming she was an idiot because she was a sidekick.

Though, she supposes, Nightwing used to be one too. She should have known that he wouldn’t be like that as much, even if being Robin to Batman carries a much different reputation than being Harley Quinn to the Joker.)

Secondly: That was actually… sorta sweet of him.

“Thanks for remembering,” she says, and she _means_ for it to come out snarky but a wire gets crossed somewhere in there. “Nobody else does.” There it goes. Much better.

“I have a pretty good memory,” Nightwing says easily. “Comes with the vigilante detective territory.” He takes a breath, shifts a little on the couch. “I just meant it doesn’t seem like your style,” he adds before she can figure out whether she wants to ask or not. “You don’t want to date me—”

“You wouldn’t want to date anyone either if the Joker was your ex.”

“—you’re probably right about that,” Nightwing mutters, and he sounds almost… venomous about it? But then, he’s got his own (enormous) list of reasons to hate the guy, so it’s not really surprising. “My point is that we’re not together and you’re trying to stay out of trouble. Knowing who I really was would probably just get you into more of it.”

...yeah. But she still kinda wants to know. “Girl’s allowed to be curious,” she says offhand. One of the bones in her corset jabs her sharply and she winces, straightening out of her instinctive slouch while she searches for the decorative buckles over the less-decorative zipper.

Nightwing’s quiet for a few seconds. “I used to be an acrobat,” he offers.

Harley’s fingers pause over the pleather-and-steel monstrosity she’s wearing. “Yeah?” she says, tries to make it come out casual, mostly succeeds. “Ran away to join the circus, huh?”

And there’s that little snorting laugh again. “Something like that.”

She’s pretty sure he wouldn’t say anything more even if she waited around for it, so she doesn’t. But it’s something—it’s a nice gesture, if nothing else: a little fragment of his real past. If he’s not lying to her. But he—

Her judgement is skewed, always has been. But he doesn’t seem like the type.

It’s nice of him, whatever it is. The only fair thing is to respond in kind. He already knows her name, her face, the _relevant_ parts of her background, but maybe not all of it. Probably not all of it; he’s not Batman. He wouldn’t memorize her freakin’ medical history just because she used to run around with his arch-nemesis.

“I did gymnastics in middle school,” she says. “And high school. And college.”

“Liked it that much?”

“Sorta. That and scholarships. Can’t all be billionaires, right?”

Nightwing huffs into the phone. She can hear him smiling. “Right,” he agrees. “At least it came in handy. ...Not that I _liked_ chasing you over half the rooftops in Gotham—”

“Liar,” she shoots back, and her grin is unapologetically wide even though no one can see.

One second. Two. “You got me,” he admits.

* * *

Every single part of her body hurts. Harley makes it through the workday through vigorously overdosing on half the Cold & Flu aisle at once and some judicious wiggle room in her interpretation of the health code, but she’s like 80% sure that she got this from Jimmy in the back of house, so it’s not like she’s the worst offender here.

She makes three wrong turns getting home, her head’s so messed up. She’s pretty sure that she’s germed up every streetlight and wall the whole way back. Harley takes the shortcut that she only ever takes when she’s mad and wants somebody to punch and she’s pretty sure that the only reason nobody tries to mug her this time is because she is clearly too gross to touch right now.

She’s not in her own head enough to think about why it’s a dumb idea to call. The only other kinda-friend she has is Pam and they’re… it’s not that they’re not talking right now, it’s just that they haven’t had the “hey, sorry I nearly maybe kinda sorta risked committing as many kinds of genocide as there are species of things on this planet” talk yet and it’s still a little awkward.

(She doesn’t think about when she started categorizing Nightwing of all people as a friend. He just ended up there. Harley doesn’t question these things.)

“Hey,” Nightwing says.

Harley sniffles pathetically. It doesn’t help anything. “I’m sick,” she complains. She tries to elaborate but her nose stages an invasion of her throat and a disgusting fit of cough-choking interrupts the first syllable.

“Ouch,” Nightwing says sympathetically. “Cold or something worse?”

“Dunno,” she mumbles. She gets her door open on the third try, starts rifling through the plastic grocery store bags littering her apartment. She had the energy to raid half of their supply of off-brand Nyquil, but not nearly enough to put it in any sort of order once she got back home.

“Have you been to a doctor?”

“I’m a waitress who used to be a supervillain. Of _course_ I haven’t gone to a freakin’ doctor.” Honestly. She flops down onto her sofa in a huff.

“Right,” Nightwing says, and at least he has the decency to sound adequately chastised. “Do you want me to come over?”

And there it is, finally, the slip-up—the moment that he stops being a persistently good friend-with-benefits guy and starts being the absolute dickhole she’s been expecting all this time, and it’s almost a _relief_ even if the timing is fucking awful—

“Not like _that_ ,” he snaps before she can even finish inhaling in preparation for a rant. “You’re sick and you live alone. I'm offering to help.”

Harley swallows what feels like her own tongue but is more likely just a ridiculous amount of phlegm. “Oh,” she says, deflating. She wavers.

God, she was only angry for like two seconds and she's exhausted. If she had any dignity to begin with, she probably would have said no, but… she's _so_ tired, and she can't do a damned thing without making that worse and she needs all the energy she can muster to make it through work because she can't just not go—

She lost her ability to give a damn how pathetic she looks the day she started dressing up like a doll and making googly eyes at someone who used her as a human shield more often than he even hugged her. There's no pride left to keep intact.

“Tuck me in and I'll kick your ass,” she says.

“I know your tricks now, Harley,” Nightwing replies. “The tack thing will only work once, and right now you'll doze off before you can try knocking me out normally.”

Harley makes an irritable sound. “Fuck you, Nightwing,” she says, and immediately proves him right by falling asleep.

* * *

She wakes up feeling like someone's taken a belt sander to the inside of her throat. Harley whines, covering her face with her pillow and seriously considering just smothering herself with it.

...with the pillow that she knows for a _fact_ that she didn't fall asleep on, because she was on her couch when she was talking to Nightwing.

Harley pulls it off again and glares at it suspiciously.

She's definitely in her bed, her sheets are definitely pulled up to her shoulders, and she definitely didn't wake up last night to move.

“Ni—” And even that's too much, her voice clawing up her ravaged throat. Harley flinches, squeezing her eyes shut.

Well, that's gonna be a pain in the ass talking to customers today.

Before she can really get a good internal whine going, she hears a footstep. (And she wouldn't, if he didn't want her to hear. She can spot him tailing her from above because fire escapes are noisy and she knows to look up as well as around when she thinks she's being followed, but on a flat surface with all the time in the world _and_ her senses not exactly being at 100%... he's just being careful not to sneak up on her.)

“Hey,” he says, rounding the corner and coming into view. “Figured you might not be able to talk.” And then he's… putting a little dry-erase board in her lap. There's a red marker attached to it with a little string.

Harley stares at it. She picks up the marker. It doesn't bite.

She uncaps it and spends a full minute drawing a disgruntled face while Nightwing snickers next to her, covering his mouth with his hand.

“You're already sick,” he says. “I didn't think you'd want a crick in your neck too.”

She pulls a face. God, she really must have been out of it. She should have woken up to the sound of him opening the window or picking her lock, let alone him picking her up off the couch and _carrying_ her.

Maybe he gassed her a little? Do the bats do that or is random anaesthesia too risky in their opinion? They didn't do it _before_ , but she was always just getting punched, anyway. The old Harley didn't lend herself to the indirect approach.

 _Drugs?_ she writes hopefully, just next to the wobbly chin.

Nightwing glances back at her kitchen counter, where he's… taken the boxes all out of the bags and lined them up. “Any preferences?”

Harley eliminates the nose. _All of them?_

Nightwing blinks. “Most of those are just the same things with different proportions, you know,” he says cautiously. And almost all of them have _extra strength_ printed on somewhere.

 _I survived the Joker_ , she points out. _Probably immune to poisoning?_

He wrinkles his nose fretfully under the mask. “If you stop breathing, I will drag you to the hospital,” he says, getting up.

He switches on her little electric kettle while he's at it, but she doesn't overanalyze it.

Harley wipes the board clean. _Can't afford it,_ she writes, flipping the board around as he comes back with a glass of water and a handful of capsules.

Nightwing’s lips tighten. “I could take you to—”

Harley covers his mouth with a corner of the blanket so she doesn't infect him while she shuts him up. _Idc what secret hospitals superheroes have_ , she scribbles. _Not_ _going._

Nightwing looks a little upset about it, but when she pulls her hand back he just hands the water over without another word on the subject.

“Do you work tonight?” he asks instead, his (probably?) blue eyes concerned behind the mask's lenses. Harley lets herself stare for a bit while she downs her medicine.

And then she nods. _Closing,_ she writes.

“Hm.” Nightwing tugs his fingers through his hair, accidentally (?) spiking it up and… yeah, she definitely sees Robin now. Damn.

He looks like he's not too far off in age from her; she remembers him looking much younger as Robin, but maybe it was the outfit or the hair or just his constant proximity to Batman making him look it in comparison. Sleek, skintight outfit with no layers to conceal the shape of his body, fewer bright colors to distract—

He's talking and she's checking him out when she's too sick to do a damn thing about it. Fuck. She tries listening instead.

“—cover for you,” he says.

 _?_ , she writes.

“If you want,” he says. “I could tell the people you work with that I'm trying to investigate someone, see if they'll let me take over your shifts until you're better.”

Harley blinks. _You can do that?_

Nightwing grins. “It isn't the first time I've gone undercover. It's just the first time I've been able to do it with the mask on.”

And isn't that a shame? she thinks before she can stop herself. _Only if I still get paid for it_ , she says.

Nightwing gives her a little salute, a grateful smile touching his eyes as if _she's_ the one doing _him_ a favor.

* * *

He leaves her with medication and water both in easy access, burritoed in blankets in front of the television. He even makes her some chamomile before he goes, which is weird because she didn't even _have_ any chamomile before he got there. And yet.

Harley dozes in and out through most of a Star Trek marathon, makes a handful of especially unhelpful YouTube comments on her phone, and eats an entire box of crackers. Nightwing comes back in the middle of the night, through the front door this time (which he picks the lock of, but he at least texts her first to tell her he's doing it), and hands over a little plastic container of soup.

 _I think I love you_ , she writes.

Nightwing laughs. “Don't get too excited,” he says. “It's my grandfather’s.”

She gets too excited anyway. It's delicious even with half her senses on the fritz.

* * *

It takes her a week to get back on her feet, and she's not above admitting that without Nightwing it would have been twice that. He didn't swing by every single day, but most days; he does actually convince her boss to let him take her shifts, and he does actually bring his tips back for her. He promises that whatever regular pay he ends up getting will go to her too, and she believes him.

She watched him get more and more exhausted as time went on. On day three, he winced every time he moved his right arm. On day five, he fell asleep on the couch for about fifteen minutes, his head pillowed on her shoulder. He awakened with a flinch and immediately apologized, but on close inspection it was hard to tell whether the darkness around his eyes was from shadows or from exhaustion. And it's like… is he patrolling Blüdhaven _and_ taking care of her _and_ working her freakin’ job?

_Why?_

(It only takes her a day to start overthinking it.)

* * *

“What the hell are you doing, Harl?” she demands in the general direction of the wall.

The wall has no answer. Neither does she.

“It's not that I have _feelings_ ,” she explains. “I mean, it's not even that _he_ has feelings, like he's a hero, right? Maybe he's just as weird about helping random people with death flu as bomb threats or hostage situations?”

The fridge is wholly impassive despite her questioning look.

“It's just…” Harley huffs, opening her cabinet and doing nothing. “I guess it's just really close to _acting_ like it? Maybe? You're supposed to do this shit for people you're actually with?”

Sometimes she realizes exactly how little of a frame of reference she has and it makes her kinda furious.

“Pam tried,” she muses, because she's willing to admit that now that she's out of her infatuation with the Joker. “Okay, she was a li’l weird about it ‘cause she's half plant and prolly doesn't know how humans work as well anymore, but she tried.” And then it hadn't worked out and they both just sorta… stopped, and the next thing Harley knows they're throwing punches at each other.

(If she'd known that trying to go civilian again would mean leaving her behind… well, she still would have done it, but it woulda been harder.)

Harley rubs her face. “This is dumb,” she says.

The cabinets don't disagree.

“I should prolly stop,” she continues.

The fridge clicks on. (There's still soup in there.)

“Yeah,” she says, and doesn't think too hard about why the word comes out wistful.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harley has an irritating time, then an uncomfortable time, then a good time, and then a terrible time.

Battery Supplier  
[Friday 5.54 PM] turns out I don't have to do anything   
[Friday 5.55 PM] less paperwork for your boss to just pay you instead of me  
[Friday 5.55 PM] more illegal but so is vigilante justice ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Battery Supplier  
[Sunday 11.38 AM] you ok?  
[Sunday 12.29 PM] you've just been quiet lately I think  
[Sunday 12.30 PM] not that you have to talk to me I mean  
[Sunday 12.37 PM] just worry sometimes. take after Batman that way  
[Sunday 12.39 PM] not that you can't take care of yourself  
[Sunday 1.04 PM] damn it.

 

Battery Supplier  
[3.38 AM] haven't seen your name in any obituaries so I'm assuming you're good there  
[3.39 AM] going to let you be but I just wanted to say thanks :] you've been a lot nicer than I could have expected  
[3.53 AM] not that… fuck. you know what I mean.

* * *

She's walking home, again. She's being followed, again.

It's not Nightwing. It isn't any of the bats, actually—they're all _way_ quieter. So it's someone who has a bad reason to follow her and not just a super annoying one.

Harley tries not to roll her eyes too hard, just in case she gives herself away. There's a chance, if a really tiny one, that they might just fuck off. Yeah, she's tired and angry and wants to beat the shit out of someone, but she's trying to keep a low profile. Leaving an unconscious body tied up on the nearest roof is not low profile. Leaving a _dead_ body in an alley is even less low profile.

And now she's at the door to her building and the (really, really not sneaky) footsteps are still there. Harley sighs, her hand on the doorknob, and resigns herself to a much less fun evening than the last time this happened.

(She misses it, a little. Not him, just… the whole thing.)

“Okay, chump,” she says, standing up straight and dropping her hand to her side. “Before we do this, I just want you to know you picked a _bad_ time.”

Thirty minutes later, she's sitting on the roof of her apartment building, waiting for Batman. She has no flares, no way of signaling him to come to her that isn't just an unhealthy amount of spraypaint (and she's not sure how great an idea it is to graffiti the Batman symbol in bright red on her own rooftop, even if it worked out okay last time). But he gatecrashed dozens of schemes that she and the Joker were keeping _quiet_ , so she's pretty sure that he'll find her pretty quick when she wants to be found.

“Why don't you call your boyfriend?” asks her captive, looking a little glum now that she's torn his mask off but otherwise having accepted his fate.

“Shut up or I will go out and _buy_ more tape to gag you with,” she growls. “And he was _never_ my boyfriend, _god_ has no one ever heard of frenemies with benefits?”

He glares balefully at her. “Benefits like soup?”

Harley doesn't want to know how he knows. She really doesn't want to know how long he was staking out her place. “Keep talking,” she dares.

The guy—whoever he is; she wasn't listening to the monologue—doesn't seem to get the threat. “A little bird told me—”

She stuffs his mask into his mouth because that’s _her_ joke, dammit. “Tell your fuckin’ songbirds to stay away from my window and I'll _consider_ not having a little accident with your eardrums before Batman gets here,” Harley says, brandishing a marker. She tried making her own little Bat signal with it and an industrial flashlight; it worked about as terribly as she expected it would, but she can still _probably_ fit it inside an ear canal if she tries.

Not that she will, because that's the sort of thing that goes a little past self-defense, but Feathers here doesn't need to know he hasn't pushed her far enough yet.

It takes him a bit, but he spits the mask out again. “Pigeons,” he says, a little mutinously.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” She snorts. “Y’know, back in my day supervillains had class. Okay, there was that rat guy, but…”

And that’s the moment when Batman shows up. Or it’s the moment that she happens to turn her head far enough to notice him standing there, anyway. She flinches away, pure instinct born of years of getting the crap beaten out of her by animal-themed vigilantes, but she manages not to drop her marker.

“ _Geez_ ,” she says. “How long have you been there?”

Batman’s cape moves. He does not. “Not as long as you think,” he says, but that’s no freakin’ help because she’s kinda assuming that he was standing there when she dragged the Pigeon Whisperer up here an hour ago.

“Right,” she says. “Look,” she says. Neither attempt at a sentence helps her much.

Batman is still looking at her and it’s really weird and she doesn’t like it.

“I _swear_ I’m not lookin’ for trouble here,” she complains. “This guy was spying on Nightwing, saw him come through my window a few times and thought it was more than it was. But look—” and she’s said that already, hasn’t she?—“I haven’t even talked to him in like two weeks, okay?”

He crosses his arms. “I know,” he says.

“You—” Harley narrows her eyes. “You haven’t been.”

“I haven’t been,” Batman agrees flatly.

And he’s a pretty straightforward guy—at least, when he’s got the cowl on; she has no idea how he behaves without it but that’s not really the point right now—so the only option left is that Nightwing told him. So Nightwing… what, asked him about her? Let it slip? Just wanted to talk about it? She wants to know, suddenly, so sharply that it makes a red flag big enough to play matador with a solar system.

“I just figured,” she blurts out, “maybe it would be better if I just stayed out of it, right? Like, it attracted this dumbass here, so fooling around with superheroes is clearly a bad way to stay _out_ of trouble, and I don't even wanna know what he had to do to take care of me when I was sick, so it was like… I was doing us both a favor?”

Batman neither confirms nor denies this.

“Okay, I get it, ghosting him wasn't the best thing to do,” she continues, and she kinda sounds like she's begging and she has no clue why. “But what are you s’posed to do? ‘Hey, Nightwing, it's been fun but if you're nice to me for another three minutes I'm gonna lose it’? ‘Sorry but I'm pretty sure your dick isn't worth being taken hostage by every masked schmuck who thinks we're dating’? ‘It's not that I'm afraid of commitment it's just that my last two relationships were toxic figuratively and then _literally_ so you can't blame a gal for being cautious’?”

Batman's mouth tightens. It's one of the most frightening things she's had to watch as a civilian.

“I don't wanna _hurt_ him,” she insists for some reason. “I just… you know…” Harley looks to Batman for help. She finds none.

“Okay, okay, you're right. Okay? I'll just—I'll say something,” she snaps, half terrified and half furious, and she flees downstairs.

So quietly that the breeze muffles it, Batman gives a sigh.

* * *

Her decision’s been made, and as little as Batman had to say about it Harley doesn’t want to run the risk of him actually giving a damn. She’s got to talk to Nightwing.

But that doesn’t help her figure out _how_ to. Just sort of sending him something dumb or calling him up feels… cheap and wrong in a way she is not going to think about too much. People are supposed to make up from stupid I-got-scared-and-stopped-talking-to-you-out-of-nowhere things in person, right? Or at least apologize for them in person, because hey, it’s reasonable to think that Nightwing wouldn’t _want_ to start anything up again. It’d probably be better that way, even.

But, still. She should probably actually… be there. Which means she has to wait for her day off, which means that she has all the way until Monday to figure out how the hell she’s going to go about this. And also why. Why is a good question.

(She can't do this. She _shouldn't_ do this.)

Monday after work, Harley shoves her costume in a backpack and gets on the train to Blüdhaven instead of going home.

* * *

You  
[9.27 PM] Remember that roof I painted  
[9.27 PM] Ill be there tonight if you want to idk talk or something

* * *

One of the first pictures he sent her was this rooftop, proof that he'd painted over her phone number before anyone else happened to somehow stumble over it. It's different seeing it in person, somehow.

He'd left the rest of the message intact. There's just a wobbly black rectangle over the numbers and that's it. Harley sits down, puts her gloved hand to the concrete, and wonders why it strikes her as kinda… almost sweet of him.

It’s probably not actually that sweet. She probably just _thinks_ it is because of how pathetically low the bar’s been set. Pam helped, but “didn't use me as a human shield today” was good and “talked to me about something other than henchwoman things or laundry” was downright romantic before she came along, and that's a little much for one plant lady to fix.

He was just being pragmatic, taking away evidence so that it would at least be a little bit harder to trace them back to each other or whatever. And maybe he was being a little considerate, because of that whole superhero caring-about-people thing. But it’s nothing she really needs to put too much weight on.

And it’s nothing that she even gets the chance to put too much weight on, because somewhere behind her a voice says, “Harley.”

Harley whirls around, almost losing her balance, and it’s a little bit less weird that Nightwing can do that since he’s not wearing body armor but _dammit_ she still doesn’t like it. “You,” she says, “like doing that way too much.”

“Doing what?”

“Sneakin’ around like that, startling people.”

Nightwing shrugs, barely a shift of one shoulder. “Force of habit,” he says. “You get any louder than Batman, you get noticed first. Doesn’t tend to end well.”

There’s something weird about his voice, kind of… short? Not rude or unkind or anything, just clipped. Contained. Harley fights not to wince. She gets it, really. And she had a whole bunch of things that she _almost_ had planned out to say, halfway scripted out and everything, and none of them were a discussion about him being trained by an actual ninja.

Damn it.

“Hey,” she says. “So.” And she loses the rest of them.

Nightwing looks at her for a few seconds before realizing that she’s not going to continue. “So,” he agrees. “You wanted to talk?” The corner of his mouth lifts, just slightly. “I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of phones, you know. You didn’t have to come all this way.”

“I know,” she answers. He doesn’t mean it as a slight or a reference to how she very firmly _didn’t_ use her phone at him for a while there, she knows he doesn’t (he’s too polite for that, too kind, and when the hell did she start thinking of _any_ of the Bats as kind?), but maybe part of her wants him to. It gets her hackles up a little regardless. “But I wanted to. Thought it’d be better, or something.”

Guarded. That’s the word. “Better for what?”

He isn’t helping. “I dunno,” Harley says, pulling the hem of her glove. It’s going to need repairs soon—she doesn’t wear Classic Harley much for her actual job (skintight isn’t quite as good as miniskirt, apparently), but it got roughed up during the Louisiana incident, her sewing machine is broken again, and her hand-stitching has never really been the best.

Not that the fidgeting helps.

“Apologizing, I guess?” she adds, becoming suddenly fascinated with her own sleeve.

Nightwing hesitates. “You don’t have anything to apologize for, Harley,” he says finally. “Like I said, you’re under no obligation—”

She waves her hand, an irritated, jerky movement, and he cuts himself off. “I’m under no obligation, I made myself clear, blah blah blah—”

He blinks at her. “You did, though—”

“—well, maybe I’m changing my mind, alright? Maybe it was Thursday for a whole damn week, we ended up being friends, and I freaked myself out. And maybe some feathery asshat decided to try and take me hostage even _after_ I tried ghosting you, so clearly if I’m gonna be in danger it’ll happen whether you’re spotted at my place a bunch or not, and maybe your dad is really scary even when he’s not saying anything—”

Nightwing interrupts his confused puppy impression to snort, bringing a hand up to his mouth to shut himself up.

“—so _maybe_ I actually _wanted_ to get on the dirtiest, stinkiest train ever invented so I could make myself clear again. ’Cause I’m sorry.”

The words came out a lot angrier-sounding than she’d meant them to, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He just nods a little, the lines of his mouth softening. “Okay,” he says.

 _That’s it?_ she thinks, baffled. She wasn’t really expecting him to get snappish with her or anything, definitely wasn’t (consciously) expecting him to throw her off the roof because he’s not wearing nearly enough purple for that, but she’s not used to apologies just sorta… happening with nothing else going down. “We’re good?” she asks.

Nightwing laughs almost audibly, a breath through his nose that could be easy to misconstrue as just… well, breathing. “We’re good,” he confirms. “I mean, we’d be better if you’d actually explained any of that, but… we’re good.”

Oh. “Yeah,” she agrees, a self-conscious chuckle behind the words. “That would have been a good idea.”

He shifts his weight from foot to foot, almost too slowly to notice. “I really should look around,” he says. “I don’t think there’s anything big in the works tonight, but…”

For some reason, that doesn’t really occur to her that often. Batman and his ilk always felt somehow omniscient— _definitely_ felt that way with their habit of bursting in and screwing everything up in the nick of time no matter how careful their prey had been—and for a long time she’d assumed that they just didn’t have lives of their own, that they prowled around in dark alleys and cracked impossible security systems around-the-clock. And then she’d got friendly with Nightwing, and then she’d got _actually_ friendly with Nightwing, and there was the implication that he actually did have a life outside of the spandex and the jumping off of buildings. So “practically omniscient”—or “in constant contact with Superman or someone similarly able to eavesdrop on criminal activity through a whole city and therefore still practically omniscient”—had seemed like the most likely option.

But no. Nightwing has a civilian life _and_ he does his own legwork, all the time. And Blüdhaven isn’t Gotham by a long shot—Gotham has a whole _family_ of mini-Bats next to the big guy. As far as Harley can tell, Nightwing’s on his own in here.

She feels kinda guilty for interrupting him, now that the reality of it hits her again. God, no wonder the poor guy had been so tired when he was looking after her.

“Oh,” she says. “Right, yeah, I forgot. Sorry. I can—”

“You can come with me if you want,” Nightwing offers, and it’s hard to tell behind the mask but he almost looks like he startled himself with that.

“…huh?”

“I already know you can keep up with me after all the time we used to spend chasing each other around,” he says wryly. “And I know you don’t hurt people any more than you have to these days, even when you _don’t_ have Batman looking over your shoulder.”

This is… weird. This is a kind of weird that she has no clue what to do about. “I’m not a superhero,” she says.

“You don’t have to be.” Nightwing smiles at her. Something looks off about it, but not in a bad way. “You had more things to say, I have places to be—you don’t even have to help if you don’t want to.”

But whether she’s helping or not, whether she does a single solitary thing or not, she’ll still be spotted by somebody. Somebody’s gonna tell somebody else that Harley Quinn was in Blüdhaven, patrolling, with Nightwing; somebody else is going to remember that Harley Quinn was in Gotham working alongside Nightwing and Batman; and just like that, Harley Quinn is going to be back. Really back. She won’t just have to worry about the pigeon guy, or whatever other pest-themed pest decides to go after her. She’ll…

(But. For all she wants to protect Harleen Quinzel, bring herself back into the light as a civilian, she has a whole filing cabinet full of offers and rejection letters to tell her that ship is beyond sailed. She fucked up, people died, she kept fucking up, and by the time she finally got sick of it all it was too late.)

And hey, her parole officer seemed to like it when she was spotted with Batman doing the exact opposite of fighting him. Maybe this’ll help in some weird, stupid way.

Even if it doesn’t, she… she can’t really remember the last time that she had actual _allies_ when she had this getup on. Probably just Pam, when they were still together and working together.

It sounds pretty nice to have that again. Sounds _really_ nice to have it with someone who couldn’t make her food attack her even if he wanted to.

“Okay,” she hears herself saying. “Yeah, sure. Where are we going?”

Nightwing gives a little start, then grins. “Wow,” he says. “You really _did_ miss me, didn’t you?”

She’s pretty sure she flushes a little red. Thankfully, it’s completely impossible to see it under the makeup. “Don’t push it, Birdboy,” she says, and punches him (carefully) in the shoulder.

* * *

It’s nice. More than nice. It’s weirdly… almost fun.

Most of the night is spent just running across rooftops, occasionally peeking down when one of them hears shouting. Nightwing must actually have _some_ kind of surveillance something-or-other going on, because there are a couple of times where he stops still, fiddles with a little phone-looking thing tucked inside his utility belt, and listens intently to absolutely nothing at all. A couple of times, he takes an abrupt turn after doing that and sprints in a different direction. Once, he just straight-up jumps off a building.

Yeah, she’s not following him down there. He’s got his grappling crap. She has power lines. Not happening.

He does come back, though, looking a little ruffled but not worse for wear, and he gives her the sweetest little apologetic grin. “I can grab a spare for you next time,” he says, wiggling the grapple at her. “If you want to make a next time, that is.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she says, but her tone of voice is completely wrong for the whole situation. Oops.

She does actually end up helping about half an hour in, even though she really doesn’t mean to. It’s just this thing where there are a bunch of shady-looking bastards doing something that she wasn’t paying any attention to, and Nightwing drops down behind them to tap one on the shoulder with an escrima stick, and then that sort of escalates into him beating the everliving crap out of half a dozen people at the same time. Which shouldn’t be attractive, but absolutely is.

Anyway. One of the guys has the actually pretty bright idea to just get the hell out of there, and Nightwing’s got his hands full, so Harley just kind of grabs his arm as he tries to slip past. He panics and tries to run, she digs her heels in and shifts her weight a little, he ends up careening around in a crazy semicircle and smashing his face into a wall from his own momentum.

Nightwing spares her a glance, nods his thanks, and then wraps his legs around someone’s throat and twists him to the ground and Harley’s mouth goes completely dry.

She has no frame of reference for how Nightwing’s patrols usually end up ending, but this one finishes off with him slipping into some dodgy-looking 24-hour diner while she waits on the roof (has she been spotted at least fifteen times tonight? Yes. Does this mean she’s going to walk into a place full of civilians and sit down and eat a freakin’ burger in costume? Hell no) and coming out a little bit later with a nondescript brown paper bag.

“Seriously,” she says, as he fishes out a thin cardstock box from its confines and hands it to her. It smells… way more delicious than anything has any right to, and she hopes that it’s because the food is actually good and not because she’s just starving.

“Mhm,” he agrees, taking the other one out, opening it, and popping a fry into his mouth.

“You can just,” she says slowly. “Walk in there, in that, and order food.”

“Yep.”

“And nobody says anything?”

Nightwing shrugs. “Depends on the place, I guess. But not in there.” He glances sidelong at her. “There’s a coffee shop that Batman pops into sometimes when he’s on patrol,” he adds with a grin.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

Harley stares at him. “And nobody tries to blow it up?” _And nobody I ever knew in the supervillain scene ever_ **_heard_ ** _about it?_

“Nobody there really mentions him,” Nightwing says, peeling open the aluminum foil around his cheeseburger. “And whenever word _does_ get out about it… if you were still the Harley that blew anything up at all, would you want to go after the place Batman gets his coffee?”

She considers this, nibbling on a fry. It doesn’t taste bad. It actually tastes really good, even if it’s a little too hot to be completely comfortable. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would take kindly to someone ruining his caffeine fix,” she allows.

What the hell kind of coffee does Batman drink, anyway? Straight espresso? Straight espresso dumped in a cup of black drip coffee with nothing else in it? Does he just grab a handful of beans and eat them at people as a power move?

Probably that one. She eats another fry and burns her tongue on it. It’s so worth it.

“So,” Nightwing says, after a silence long enough for him to destroy a quarter of his food. “I guess we didn’t get the chance to talk much out there.” He sounds almost apologetic.

He really shouldn’t. It’s not like Harley _wants_ to talk. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Look, I’m not really that great at the whole talking thing anyway…”

“I lived with Batman for a decade,” he points out.

She sucks in a breath. It’s maybe a laugh? “Right,” she says. “So I guess… we’re actually friends now, right?”

Nightwing nods. “Looks like it,” he says, not unkindly. “And I did catch you staring back there, by the way, so I’m guessing you don’t want to change the, uh. First arrangement.”

“Nuh-uh,” she says, faster than she means to. “Not if I can get away with keeping it.”

“Just adding onto it.”

Harley is so damn grateful he seems to have some kind of idea of what he’s doing, because she sure doesn’t. “Yeah,” she says. “Friend stuff.” Like talking, and maybe helping each other out from time to time. Crashing on each other’s couches, or—

Aw, dammit.

“I,” she says. “Kinda forgot about where I was sleeping tonight.”

Nightwing pauses. “Right,” he says. At least he sounds just as taken aback by that as she does, so he’s probably not upset or assuming she’s trying to shoulder in on his secret identity or anything.

“I mean, _actually_ forgot,” she adds. “And I’m not askin’ to go back to your place here or anything, don’t worry, just… you know anywhere that’ll put a girl up for the night at 2 AM without attempted robbery?”

“This is Blüdhaven, not Gotham,” Nightwing says distractedly. “Somebody robs you, it’s probably going to be through bureaucracy, not at gunpoint.” He eats another bunch of fries, maybe to give himself a little time to think. There’s something on his face that’s almost a grimace, but… “I have a few places,” he admits. “Safehouses, I mean. Or safe-abandoned-apartment-buildings. They’re meant for emergencies, so they won’t be _comfortable_ —”

But they’re his safehouses, and he’s willing to let her in one? Hell, she was just hoping he could tell her a cheap motel that hopefully didn’t have roaches in it. This is… not what she was expecting at all. “I’ve slept in worse,” she says quickly. “I mean, if you don’t mind… I can—”

“I don’t mind,” he interrupts before she can talk herself out of it. “Trust me, I don’t.” She’s not sure what to make of his tone—he doesn’t mind, and that’s… a problem? Because he thinks it’s a problem, or because Batman wouldn’t approve?

(She really, really hopes it’s just Batman. She’s had him look at her disapprovingly from the first day she saw him up close at all; that wouldn’t be new.)

“Okay,” she says. “I mean, if you’re sure.”

His smile is soft and really, really nice to look at. “I’m sure.”

* * *

Nightwing takes her to a room in the top floor of a sad-looking building with no lights on in the whole place. It looks distinctly like a safehouse, but it also looks distinctly nicer than any of the safehouses she saw when she was a supervillain. There’s pretty much nothing in it—a window (which he shimmies open and they both climb through, because of course he can’t just use the door like a normal person), a closet with a padlock (which he picks, because of course he can’t just use a key like a normal person), and a couple of nondescript duffel bags stored inside said closet.

One duffel bag holds a couple of changes of clothes and a spare suit. The other one has a flashlight, a first aid kit, a roll of duct tape (worrying, or maybe intriguing), and a sleeping bag. He strips down, inspects a bruise spreading over his ribs while she stands dumbly by the window and inspects everything else.

“The water works if you want a shower,” he says.

“You saying I stink?” Harley can’t not say.

He snickers. “I’m saying we both do,” he says. “No one _doesn’t_ after running around rooftops for hours.”

Hours? Huh. She’s not feeling it yet, but… ugh, tomorrow’s going to be hell. “So if both of us stink…” she says, grinning a little. Not that they really have time to do much of anything before the lateness hits her and she passes out on the nearest soft surface, but still. She has a terrible, awful, cheesy reputation to maintain with him.

He hesitates as he finishes stepping out of his costume. “I’m not sure the shower’s big enough,” he hedges.

“It’d be faster,” she says.

“Unless you get distracted.”

“Look, buddy, it’s…” Harley instinctively makes for her pocket before realizing that she left her phone with her civilian clothes in the bus station locker. Damn it. “It’s whatever time it is, and I don’t know about _you_ but I need to sleep sometime. I’m not the one who’s gonna get distractible here.”

Nightwing snorts. “Go on ahead,” he says, reaching into one of the duffels. She recognizes it, goes through a ridiculous amount of it every month just from how many of her costume changes need to be literally glued on in some places, and her heart does something really weird.

Adhesive remover. He’s gonna take the mask off. He’s gonna take the mask off, but he doesn’t really want her to see it, but he’s too polite to tell her to just go away.

Right, yeah, privacy and… and all that. (Seriously, it’s just a few square inches of eye socket and temple. She should not be getting all chest-fluttery about contemplating it uncovered.)

“Your loss,” she manages to say, and she flees into the bathroom. The lights don’t turn on, but there’s a really scary-big flashlight on the sink that works just fine and only makes the shadows look a little bit spooky. Harley peels out of her clothing as quickly as she can, leaves it in a crumpled heap on the floor to be dealt with later, and steps into the shower stall.

Nightwing didn’t lie; it’s pretty damn tiny. He could probably squeeze in here if he really wanted to, but it wouldn’t leave much room for either actual hygiene or just fooling around in. The faucet handle is big and clunky and the colors are gone, but she can just barely feel the imprint of engraved text on either side of the knob. It’s in cursive, because of course it is, but she’s pretty sure that there’s a C to the left and an H to the right and it’ll probably be safe if she just goes right up the middle before trying to twist anything anywhere, right?

Oh god, the middle is cold. Oh god the middle is _so cold_

Harley yelps, twists the knob hard to the right, yelps again as the water makes an abrupt turn to “probably actually boiling”, and beats a hasty retreat out of the shower entirely.

Which probably would have been a good idea in the first place, now that she thinks about it. Oh well.

Gingerly, she reaches back in and starts moving the knob half an inch at a time, just until she can’t feel the heat of the water from outside the damn stall. And then a little farther, until dipping her hand into the stream seems like it’s probably safe.

And then a little farther, because that’s still _really_ hot. But after that, it evens out to something nice and comfortable that she won’t destroy any nerve endings standing in. Sighing, Harley pulls her hair out of the pigtails, loops the hairbands around her wrist, and steps facefirst into the spray to let the paint sort itself out. She’s surprised it held up so well, honestly; she only barely sealed the stuff. This was supposed to just take maybe an hour at most.

Not that she minds.

Harley scrubs her hands over her face until she’s reasonably sure it’s mostly skin-colored again, then starts carding her fingers through her hair. There’s a bar of soap in an alcove on the side, barely used and not disintegrated into a pile of mush or anything; she gives herself a once-over with it, just enough to be pretty sure she doesn’t smell weird anymore, and then she steps back into the spray to make absolutely sure there’s no paint left anywhere. The water is pretty much in both ears when the door opens, so she doesn’t hear that; her eyes are still closed just to keep them from being sandblasted with the surprisingly powerful water pressure, so she doesn’t notice the shift in the light. What she _does_ notice is Nightwing’s voice, warm and amused and _very definitely not outside_.

“Having fun?”

Harley steps backwards so there isn’t water running directly over her face, squeegees it away from her eyelids with her fingers. She’s expecting to see him only like 98% naked, that the adhesive remover was just for later maybe or that he changed his mind or something. Or that he heard her little mini-screams and came to her rescue from the shower.

What she actually sees is his face. All of his face. It’s kinda shadowy because the flashlight isn’t _that_ good, and it’s got a suspiciously mask-shaped outline on it even with all of the glue scrubbed off, like pillow wrinkles being imprinted on a cheek; but it’s his face.

She forgets how to breathe for a couple of seconds just out of surprise. And maybe a little bit because oh, _wow_ , he’s pretty. He’s pretty, and he’s Batman’s kid (? Probably not _literally_ ; Bats doesn’t strike her as being exactly old enough to have a son in his 20s), and he’s letting her see him without the mask on.

Oh. Okay.

But hey, it’s pretty safe for him, right? She sure as hell doesn’t know who he is (though she’d definitely like to, _damn_ ), the light’s bad anyway, she’s tired, blah blah. Even if she were really, crazy good with faces, the odds are against her having seen him outside of his getup anyway. Gotham’s a big city.

“I can’t get in there unless you let me, Harl,” he says. There’s a smile crinkling the corners of his eyelids and it’s a wonder that she can move back to give him room with her knees doing whatever the hell that is.

His mask’s lenses were a bit easier to look behind than Batman’s, but then Batman has a whole damn cowl; Nightwing just has that little domino mask all nestled to his eye sockets, so she could at least get the vague impression of irises and pupils. She’d had the feeling his eyes were probably blue.

She didn’t know they’d be _that_ blue.

“Yeah,” she says as he steps in. It’s… crowded. It’s really crowded, and he’s a lot taller than her and that means that he’s kind of hogging the water a little. It is really, really hard to mind.

Nightwing grins at her, sharp-edged. “Don’t get too excited, Harley,” he says. “These are pretty exceptional circumstances. And Batman hasn’t bugged my hidey-holes.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, incredibly distracted as he reaches for the soap. And then— “Wait. He’s bugged mine?”

Nightwing wrinkles his nose and _oh my god_ it’s so cute. “Probably not,” he says. “He doesn’t even want to think about me and you, let alone run the risk of eavesdropping on us. But I can check and make sure no one else has, if you want.”

“The last person who spied on me did it with literal birds,” she complains. Or, well… she tries to complain. Her voice won’t quite do what she wants it to when he starts running the soap over himself—brisk, economical movements, and she kind of really wants to help but also she really likes just watching this.

He looks really, really good soaking wet. Harley is learning this.

“Maybe the next one will do it with literal bugs,” he says.

“Ugh, don’t even make me think about that.” Gross. “I saw a roach in the hall six months ago and I’m still paranoid about that freak. I don’t need to think about some weirdo bein’ able to talk to them.”

Nightwing chuckles. “Sorry,” he says, and he leans in and kisses her before turning his soap-wielding attention to her skin. Harley hums, melts into it a little, completely forgets that doing that means he can’t access a decent portion of her body. He’s working on her shoulders at first, anyway. It’s fine.

The fingers of his free hand glide up her spine, catch briefly on a scar low on her ribs before starting to slowly knead at the muscles of her neck and shoulders. She shudders a little, breaking the kiss to lean her forehead against his shoulder because she cannot possibly hold her head up on her own when he’s doing that.

“Hngh,” she actually, genuinely says out loud. “Who’s getting distracted now?”

Nightwing noses her temple, the soap sweeping across her back before he starts working on her arms. “I am,” he says.

“’s long as you admit it.” She opens her eyes to peer up at him. “You know I already did all that before you got here,” she says, and then immediately regrets it because what if he stops?

“Maybe this is just a really transparent excuse for me to touch you.”

Oh, she thinks. Okay, then.

His fingers move a little lower down her back. “Arms up,” he says into her hair, and it takes her a second to realize what he means. Takes her another second to realize how that’s relevant, but there’s only one bar of soap and he’s holding it.

Right.

She raises her arms. He has to draw back a little first, but he cleans off her underarms and her sides with just as much care as her back, and then takes advantage of the semi-distance to work at her front.

With way _more_ care than her back. Harley rolls her eyes, but he just grins at her, running the edge of the soap over her nipple and then following it with his thumb, cupping her breast and leaning in to kiss her again.

She bites his lip, but she does it very nicely. He makes a low, quiet sound, his hand low on her back to press her against him, the water washing over both of them. Her tongue finds a cut on the side of his mouth, but she doesn’t think it’s from today; he wasn’t bruising, at least not that she could tell.

Nightwing moves with languid purpose, drawing back before leaving a line of slow kisses—her chin, her jaw, down her throat (tongue on her pulse, on the line of her trachea as she hums out a response), a single and strangely brief touch of his mouth between her breasts and then he’s just kneeling and looking up at her.

Oh. Harley swallows. “That soap had better not be going anyplace internal,” is for some reason what comes out of her mouth.

Nightwing physically cringes. “ _No_ , Harley,” he says. “That just—no.”

“Just checkin’,” she says, leaning back against the wall with a small huff. “So, what _are_ you gonna do down there?”

He shakes his head, looking down, which has the unfortunate effect of making the water push his fringe over his eyes. “Nothing that would be a bad idea in and of itself,” he says. He reaches up, glides the soap over her hips, her thighs; but it’s definitely an afterthought now.

She tangles her fingers in his hair and moves it up out of his face. He kisses her wrist, looking up at her, and a dark heat tightens low in her belly.

Nightwing starts working on her calf, his free hand on her ankle, nudging it a little. She shifts her weight to her other leg, lets him lift her foot off the ground, has her mouth halfway open to warn him about her ticklishness and the proximity of her foot to his face, but—but he just ducks down a little, hooks her knee over his shoulder, and puts the soap down.

“Huh,” she says, because she feels like she ought to say _something._

“Hmm?” Nightwing asks. He only makes a little bit of a show of making sure both of his hands are completely free of suds before he does anything with them, even though all he does at first is brace them on her thighs. Or brace her thighs with them. It’s hard to figure out which one of them needs it more.

“Nothing,” she says. “I just was kinda not expecting… any of this?”

He turns his head, his mouth brushing the inside of her leg, just barely above her knee.

“I figured,” Harley continues, “you’d probably be a little more mad than this. Like, maybe be okay with being friends, maybe be okay with the benefits again, but you…”

But he took her on patrol with him, got her food and ate it on a rooftop with their legs dangling ten storeys off the ground, took her to his safehouse, removed his mask and—and is starting to touch her again now, one hand on her hips while the other moves between her legs, thumb giving quick exploratory brushes while his fingers start gently tracing out her entrance. It’s getting really hard to think about words.

“You didn’t stop talking to me for _that_ long,” he says. He’s still looking up at her. Her fingers are still in his hair. She should maybe move them. “I didn’t think you’d had a change of heart in the first place.”

His voice is remarkably steady for someone who’s almost fingering her. “You brought me soup,” she says, as if that explains everything. Maybe it does.

The corner of his mouth quirks up. “You let everyone who brings you soup do this?” he asks. Another sweep of his thumb—quick, punctuating.

Harley laughs breathlessly. “Nobody else is bringing me much of anything,” she says. “So I guess I do, huh?”

“Can’t fault you for being easy to please,” Nightwing says. His breath is warm on her thigh. She’s pretty sure that she’ll lose her balance if she tries to move, so she doesn’t, but it’s _really_ hard. “Anyway. I like having you around, Harley. As terrible an idea as that is.”

“Hey,” she protests weakly.

He rocks his fingers inside her in a way that makes it really hard to remember what he just said. “Just a fact, Harl,” he says. “I'm a bad idea too, or you wouldn't have had to leave a gift-wrapped wannabe supercriminal on your roof the other day.”

“Oka _aa_ y,” Harley says, wobblier than she wanted to. There's nothing for her fingers to grab hold of on the shower walls, and Nightwing’s hair is too far away to grab without making it harder to balance. “So I get why _you're_ not a good plan, but I dunno what I could—” he nips her thigh— “dotoyou _dammit_ …” Harley tries to compose herself. It's not going to happen and they both know it. “Since I've been tryin’ to keep out of trouble and all.”

Nightwing looks at her, quirks an eyebrow, and stretches forward to replace his fingers with his mouth.

“Oh _shit_ ,” she breathes. Her head thumps back against the shower wall, her thigh nearly slipping off of his shoulder as she tries to give him as much room to work as she can. Not that there’s much room in the first place unless she slides the shower door back but that’s a really great way to cover the floor with water and also guarantee that she will slip and fall and knock herself out on a toilet seat and officially outdo her previous record for “most embarrassing emergency room visit”.

Partly because she’d have to get carried there by Nightwing, because there’s no reason that he’d want to call an ambulance all the way to his _safehouse_. Or… one of them. Did he say there were others? There were probably others. He was trained by Batman. He probably has, like, seventy of them and _oh god_ he readjusts her leg a little to stabilize her as he moves in for a better angle and she forgets what she was thinking about.

Harley looks down her own body, watching his eyes—his _eyes_ —breathlessly as he looks right back up at her. He’s inscrutable, mostly because the entire lower half of his face is buried between her legs, and—again—the fact that it’s just the _lower_ half that’s covered really shouldn’t be as much of a turn-on as what he’s doing with his face at all.

“Hey,” she says, still trying not to move. It’s usually polite to ask before trying to just straight-up ride someone’s mouth, she thinks, and she doesn’t have nearly enough words left in her vocabulary for that.

He quirks an eyebrow up, but doesn’t draw back or slow down or anything. He does give a little acknowledging hum that she can _feel_ through his lips, the bastard.

Harley reaches down, finally realizing that he’s actually in reach now, and gets her fingers all mixed up in his hair. It’s just barely long enough to get tangled, brief little snarls undoing themselves over the back of her hand, but they must not be bad enough to hurt. Or they are and he likes it. “You’re really cute without the mask on, y’know that?”

She can feel him smirking just before he licks his way into her again in a way that makes her wonder what the man can do with an ice cream cone. Although that’s kind of backwards, since thinking about that would really only be to the benefit of her imagining what it would be like for him to turn those skills on _her_ , which she clearly already knows—

Harley swallows and stops thinking. It’s really not hard. Her leg tucks itself a little closer around his shoulders in an awkward, angle-y kind of embrace, and he responds with another low hum and his eyelids flicker a little bit and—and he kind of likes that, doesn’t he?

Okay, probably should have seen that coming, given how the first time they had sex was about ninety seconds after she literally duct taped him to her bedposts and started talking to herself about how killing him would have gotten rid of him faster, but still. They’ve been a lot tamer since then. Probably because… well… they kind of got off (pun intended) on the wrong foot there. She usually likes a little more negotiation before she brings out the kinky shit—she’s crazy, but she _tries_ not to be a jackass about sex, at least.

Harley gives an experimental squeeze of her thigh on the back of his neck, pushing Nightwing closer. He makes a _noise_ that’s even more delicious in the way that it’s muffled and her hips pulse down against his lips without her input. He moves up, his fingers trailing up her thigh to push inside her again as his tongue finds more interesting places to be. She can feel every drop of water from the showerhead pattering against her skin; he curls his fingers and does something unspeakable with his mouth and she’s gone so fast that it actually startles her.

She wishes so much she had an actual name to gasp out, but she makes do with what she knows. Nightwing holds her steady, one hand reaching up to rest on her hipbone so she remembers not to slide down off the wall, and only starts to move when she stops.

Her head is swimming as she peels her eyes back open, the humid air way too thick in her lungs to deal with. She watches, dazedly entranced, as he stands back up and grins at her.

He’s blocking the water, she thinks dimly, and then she surges forward to kiss him. She can taste herself on his lips a little. Clumsy in her haste and her bonelessness, she reaches between them, wraps her hand around him; she’s honestly considering returning the favor because hell he _deserves_ it but he doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to let her. Nightwing’s breath catches; he leans his head into the crook of her shoulder and he shakes through his own climax after only a few seconds, as if he was just as worked up over all of that as she was.

She kinda wonders which part of it did the trick. Not that she wasn’t a fan of the whole thing, but she _really_ feels like she got the better deal, here. This is supposed to be give and take, right?

(It wasn’t supposed to be anything at all, but that went out the window a while back.)

Harley turns her head and kisses his neck as the water washes them both clean. “Hey,” she says again.

Nightwing takes in a slightly unsteady breath, pulls back enough to smile at her as he reaches back to blindly turn the shower off. “Hey,” he replies. “Tired?”

He definitely is. Not really a bad kind, she doesn’t think, but there’s a hazy quality to his eyes that she’s pretty sure has nothing to do with sex. (She probably needs them to do this a few more times without the mask on, though, just to be sure. For wholly scientific reasons.) “Yeah,” she says. There’s a drop of water on the tip of his nose and she kisses it off.

He pulls the door back. “I’ll get you something to wear if you want,” he says. “I don’t think my clothes will _fit_ you, but…”

“Better than crawling back into my outfit after runnin’ around in it for hours?”

“Exactly.”

* * *

The sleeping bag was most definitely designed for just one person, but neither of them is willing to let the other one sleep on the bare floor, so they do their best. Harley falls asleep worryingly fast with Nightwing spooned up behind her; she wakes up once during the night to discover that she’s doing a koala impression and he’s trying very hard to sprawl despite the bag not really giving him any space to do so; when she wakes up the next time, there’s sunlight streaming through the cracked-open window and she’s alone.

Not so bad, though. Okay, she’ll admit, she’s a _little_ disappointed, but if she thinks about that too long she’ll have to start examining the reasons why, and she doesn’t know if Psychoanalyzing-Herself Harleen Quinzel is going to buy the “I just want to see what his actual face looks like in good lighting, okay” excuse. Probably best not to test it.

Harley crawls out of the sleeping bag, yawns, pulls the hem of Nightwing’s borrowed shirt up to scratch an itch in the middle of her back, and starts trying to wrestle the rogue camping gear back into the neat little roll that she _knows_ for a _fact_ it came in. She fails terribly, of course, but she tries. It’s only after she starts trying to fight it back into the closet without causing it to spill out in some awful fluffy avalanche that she notices the backpack on the floor that very definitely, absolutely wasn’t there when she went to bed. Because it’s not his, it’s hers, and she remembers exactly where she left it, and Nightwing’s hidey-hole doesn’t have a whole lot in common with a train station or its associated lockers.

Harley gives up on her original mission of putting everything exactly as it was, just letting the sleeping bag flop onto the closet floor and going to investigate her bag instead.

It’s exactly as she left it, apart from the sheet of memo pad paper held onto the front with a piece of duct tape. (Said tape, she notes, is whimsically covered in Superman logos.) In quick, spiky handwriting there read the words: _Sorry if this is creepy but I thought you wouldn’t want to walk home in my pants_. And then a little smiley face.

She fingers the note and tries to figure out how she feels about it. On the one hand: he knew (or found out, or hacked into a security camera somewhere to look and see) which locker she shoved her things in, got past the lock itself, and then took said things out. On the other hand: …yeah, he’s right, she wouldn’t want to do the Walk Of Not-At-All-Shame in boxers and a (disappointingly blank, but she supposes this _is_ supposed to be kept separate from his real personality or identity) t-shirt. So it’s a little over the top, but still pretty nice of him.

Probably comes with the territory of being on friendly terms with an actual, literal superhero that you’re banging sometimes. Kinda weird, kinda boundary-pushing, but also kinda sweet.

She flips the note over, digs through her backpack until she finds a pen that she probably accidentally stole from work, and scribbles an answer to tape to the inside of the closet door.

_I’m taking the pants anyway <3 _

* * *

You  
[7.24 PM] _([Link: FYI I Wanna F Your A - NSP - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHIKf0f9E40)_ _)_

 

Battery Supplier ♥  
[7.27 PM] i don’t have most of the body parts referenced in that song.  
[7.27 PM] which could be a problem.

 

You  
[7.28 PM] You have the important one though

 

Battery Supplier ♥  
[7.29 PM] can’t argue with that

* * *

Harley starts to get the feeling that something is terribly wrong when she calls Nightwing and he answers on the fifth ring.

Not that he always answers. They’re both adults, they’re both busy—one of them is busy in a way that involves jumping off of buildings from time to time. She’s not the kind of asshole to take it personally when she gets his voicemail. She’s just the kind of asshole to leave extremely inappropriate messages when she does.

But when he _does_ answer, it’s usually… faster. She still doesn’t know if it’s some sort of Super Important Nightwing Phone (or communicator, or whatever—she assumes there’s something phonelike involved at some point, but this is an ex-Robin she’s talking about here) or if he’s just really quick to pick it up, but the fact remains: if it rings more than three or four times, he’s not there.

(She _hopes_ it’s not a Super Important Nightwing Phone. That sounds like it would suck, never knowing if it’s ringing because someone’s giving him a tip that his city’s going to blow up in half an hour if he doesn’t stop it, or if it’s just Harley. But it probably wouldn’t be the _weirdest_ thing he’s ever done, or even the weirdest thing he’s done when it comes to her.)

The second indication that all is not quite right with the world is his voice. It’s not right, kind of—strained? And he answers with a distracted, “Hello?” like he couldn’t just check and see who was calling him before he even picked up.

There’s something familiar with that tone of voice. She can’t place it, but she doesn’t like it. “Hey,” she says. “It’s me, dork.”

Nightwing exhales a sigh that she cannot possibly figure out the meaning behind. Relief? Exasperation? …Both? “Harley,” he says. “I’m—I’m a little tied up right now…”

Yeah, he’s being weird. He’s brushed her off before—hello, busy adults, jumping off of buildings, fighting crime in absurdly tight pants—but he’s always been pretty damn clear with the reason. Or at least that he couldn’t tell her the reason. Which means that something is wrong, and there’s some external reason for him not being able to explain it right now, which means that someone is listening.

Probably?

“Oh yeah?” Harley asks, and tries to make her voice sound playfully jealous. She’s not really sure how it works out. “Thought that was my thing.”

That’s definitely a laugh, but it’s a really quiet one. “Don’t worry,” he says, in a voice that implies that she should absolutely be worrying immediately please. (He knows how to sound reassuring. She’s heard it. That’s not his reassuring voice and it is _not_ her imagination, no matter what the little tickle at the back of her head says.) “It’s not in the fun way.”

Her phone blips once. She pulls it away to frown at it, but the screen stays dark, even when it’s far enough away from her ear that it ought to at least display the call duration or something. But… well, the call’s still _going_. She can hear him breathing. “Bad time?” she says, putting the thing back to her ear.

Nightwing’s voice is tight. “Very,” he says, and then he—he hisses in all sharp and sudden and she remembers where she knows this from. The Floronic Man had cracked half his ribcage down in Louisiana, and a few minutes before that he’d had a bad landing after getting bitchslapped out of the air and it had screwed with his ankle; after the adrenaline wore off and the pain started really hitting, his words had gone clipped and careful with the effort of not hurting.

Harley actually scares herself with the fury that flashes in her chest at the realization. He’s in trouble, he’s in _pain_ , someone’s _hurt_ him and ohh if she ever finds out who and why she’s gonna—

Her phone blips again. It sounds a little sick. She’s not planning on giving it any particular mind at first, but she sees something light up on it with it still pressed against her cheek.

It’s the Bat symbol, rotating jet-black on a grey background, as a… a progress bar? A _progress bar_ starts filling up at the bottom of the screen. She finds herself holding her breath, frowning at it in confusion and maybe a little bit in indignation. But just a little bit, because—

“I gotta go,” Nightwing says, just as the loading screen blips out and is replaced with… what is definitely, absolutely a map of the city. Black streets, grey buildings with little white outlines, a plain white dot over her apartment—current location of the phone hooking into the Bat-whatever she’s looking at, if she had to guess, because there’s no _practical_ reason for Batman to have a special marker for her home and not for Arkham freakin’ Asylum—and then, as the map zooms out, a little blue dot on practically the opposite end of Gotham. She got pretty good at the anatomy of the docks when she was still a frequent flier there; she doesn’t need any of the street names or labels that would normally be _super helpful on a map, Batman_ to know that it’s on the lighthouse off the southernmost shore. “Talk to you later?”

Harley bites her lip. “This isn’t just your way of putting off me meeting your family, is it?” she hazards.

He laughs again, but it sounds a little more genuine this time. “It isn’t, trust me,” he says. “I _want_ you to meet them.”

She’s not great at speaking in code, but she guesses… probably… that means Batman’s not already on his way? So she has to find out how to contact him, again, on a stricter time limit than “before her captive talks her to death”. Great.

“You sure you wanna give me that much power?”

“I’m sure.” And whatever warmth creeps into his voice is immediately ruined by the quiet, flinching breath that comes immediately afterwards. “I really have to—”

Harley gets off of her couch. “I get it,” she says. “Bye—” it slips out before she can think about it and it tastes a little like poison but not enough to choke her— “puddin’.”

Nightwing makes a slightly strangled noise that she’s _pretty sure_ isn’t actually him being strangled. “See you later,” he says, and the connection closes.

Harley presses her knuckles into her eyes until starbursts spark over her vision. Her heart is going about as crazy as she is, nausea starting to pull at her gut and _god, not_ **_now_ ** _…_

This is stupid. She’s stupid. This isn’t her thing, she’s not a hero, she was never even that great at being a villain, she’s a _sidekick_ she doesn’t go sprinting into danger she just. Wants. To stay home, to have a home to stay home in, to be normal, to just have one name and a dog and maybe a hypothetical partner that _doesn’t_ scare her to death to label, and whom she doesn’t have to worry about getting kidnapped and tortured.

Batman’s got no sense of privacy, right? He… he might think to check in on Nightwing himself, see that he’s in Gotham, maybe get weird or confused about it

(except Nightwing has been in Gotham regularly of late, maybe not at that end of town but at least in the city proper, so he might not think to question it until)

It’s gone too far. It isn’t safe. _She_ isn’t safe. Nightwing hasn’t hurt her, he’s _different_ , but she knows—she knows the pattern, she knows she can’t trust herself not to spot things, maybe she’s already brushing things off that aren’t completely acceptable in a relationship—and they’re not even _in_ a relationship, _god_ —like him fucking hacking her phone and installing a Bat-tracker onto it

(so she can get in touch with Batman, so she can help him, he had to do something, right?)

or breaking into lockers or not letting her go to work when she was sick

(not _wanting_ her to, there’s a difference, he gave her a choice)

and none of it matters because she’s already opening her closet and going for the costume in the back. The real one, the battered one, the one she’s been remaking over and over all this time.

She stops just short of picking it up, the same paralysis in her mind spreading to her fingers and making them suddenly and horribly _freezing_. She can’t… she can’t put that on. She can’t put that on, and run all the way across Gotham, to take care of some guy that she cares about more than she should, who’s gotten himself into more trouble than he ought.

(But she can put a different one on.)

She’s still going to go.

(Yes.)

It’s a cobbled-together thing, elements of four or five different costumes—Arctic actually involves pants, Bombshell has incredibly practical combat boots, Steampunk has a belt with pouches on it so she can take her phone and have both hands free—but it feels a little better. More…

Something.

Whatever it is, it’s enough. Harley’s hands are still shaking when she clambers out onto the fire escape, but it’s not so bad that she can’t make it to the roof and start running.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley tries out heroism for a bit. Nightwing makes a surprisingly good damsel in distress.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahaha I thought that I could finish this in three chapters
> 
> (that's a lie I thought I could finish it in one)
> 
> Also—I reread the first chapter and noted a minor plot hole and a less minor instance of accidentally repeated dialogue... oops. Both of these things have since been edited.

Harley has a few different ideas for how to get ahold of Batman and none of the easy ones are working out for her. She tried looking around the Bat-stalker-app for an interface to maybe contact somebody with, but she only managed to scroll around the screen. She scrolled around the screen for a while trying to find any other little dots—or, knowing Bats himself, probably just a straight-up Bat symbol—but it's just her and Nightwing.

(So you have to give someone  _ permission _ to track you down with this thing. The irony does not escape her.)

She thinks about swinging by Gordon's old place to tell him to fire up the signal or call the guy or something, but he's probably moved since the years she gave a shit where he lived. And with her luck, he wouldn't even be home anyway, and she's pretty sure his daughter lives alone these days, maybe.

(She doesn't think about Barbara much. Makes her chest feel all twisty and that's not even fair; it's not like she pulled the trigger.)

She could call the police, but there's no guarantee they'd believe her. She could show up at the GCPD’s front door, but that sounds like a great way to get arrested and then ignored. There's a moment where she thinks she has a breakthrough—lighthouses are just really big lamps, the Batsignal is just a really big lamp, so what if she made a cardboard cutout and stuck it to the—and that's as far as she gets before she realizes she has no clue how lighthouses work and she's not willing to risk Nightwing's safety over it.

So Harley makes a detour to the GCPD headquarters. There's no one on the roof, probably because the only people dumb enough to go up there are either in the Bat family or trying to summon someone who is, which is especially great because it means no one sees her misjudge the distance and wipe out horribly trying to jump onto it from one street over and two floors up.

Harley pushes herself to her feet, wincing as her now very bruised everything protests against it. She limps over to the darkened signal, hopes to hell that the giant inviting lever on the side is the on switch and not the “somebody who has no idea how to light this up is trying to call Batman, so they should clearly be arrested immediately” alarm, and lets out a breath when it clunks into life.

The shape in the sky doesn't cause the same dread it used to, these days. There's something to be said for that.

The door to the roof creaking open barely a minute later, on the other hand, causes quite a lot of all kinds of dread. Harley turns, her chest sinking a little, to the familiar sight of a pair of cops with their guns drawn. They're pointing them at the ground at the moment, not at her, but she's not holding out much hope for that to continue.

It takes the front one—tallish, skinnyish, in a uniform that doesn't look quite broken in yet—a couple of seconds to figure it out. “Harley Quinn?” he asks, frowning.

And yep, there are the guns. Harley holds her hands out and hopes it looks adequately pacifying. She looks to the sky, but she doesn't see any ominous cape-shaped silhouettes yet.

She swallows. “Look,” she says. “I know this looks  _ really _ bad, but I  _ swear _ I'm being one of the good guys right now. Honest.”

The front cop wavers. His partner doesn't. “How about you step away from the Batsignal,” she says. Her voice is smooth, conversational, as if she's just talking to Harley over coffee and not pointing her freakin’ gun at her. “And come with us, and then you can explain why you're trying to get Batman's attention.”

“Do none of you read the news?” bursts out of her. “I helped him save the world and I didn't even turn on him a little bit! Slap a cape on me and call me Robin!” Ew, no. Maybe not that far.

“Then why can't you contact him yourself?”

Harley kind of hates her right now. “I mostly talk to—You know what? It doesn't matter.” She straightens up a little, trying really hard not to scowl and partly failing. “There are  _ lives _ at stake, okay? Well—okay, there's just the one, but I care about it a lot, and I  _ have _ to talk to Batman.  _ Please _ .”

The officers tensed up halfway through her speech. She figured it was probably something to do with the whole “lives at stake” thing, but she reconsiders pretty sharpish when a fourth voice cuts in.

“Stand down,” Batman says from somewhere behind her, because of  _ course. _ But hey, at least it works, even if it does kinda give her a heart attack. “She's with me.”

Harley looks back to the cops; there's a second of hesitation, the tallish one looking a little more skeptical than is polite, but they holster their weapons. And then stay there.

Eh. At least she's not being threatened anymore.

Batman turns the signal off with a  _ clunk _ of aged machinery. Harley blinks against the sudden darkness until she registers the vaguely expectant way Batman is looking at her. At least she assumes he's looking at her. It's hard to tell.

So they're doing this now, with those two standing there. Okay. That's cool.

“Nightwing's in trouble,” she blurts.

Batman’s face tightens. What she can see of it, anyway. “Follow me,” he says, and jumps off of the roof. She can only just barely hear the hiss of a grappling hook being fired before a shadow launches up the side of the nondescript office building across the street.

Of course he does that. Of course he can’t just let her talk to him here, or tell the police to go away if he doesn’t want them listening in, or—God forbid—take the stairs for once in his life. Helpless, Harley gives one last look at the pair at the door before she goes to the edge of the rooftop.

At least there’s a fire escape, even if it  _ is _ across the street. And at least the streets are kinda narrow around here. (Sometimes, she finds herself wondering if the Gotham city planners don’t intentionally design things so that all of the walls are really close together, just to make it easier on Bats and his brood to run around. It wouldn’t surprise her anymore.)

She takes several steps back, scuffs her boot against the ground to get a feel for how it flexes—they’re broken in for walking and they haven’t screwed her over yet tonight, but there’s a little light parkour jog and there’s trying to keep up with  _ Batman _ and she’s not sure how well they’ll treat her ankles for that. It’s probably safe.

Harley takes a running leap. There’s one single breathless moment where nothing happens, good or bad, and then she slams into the metal railing diaphragm-first.

She chokes, tries to suck in a breath and can’t, but it’s not the worst landing she’s ever had; she’s not stunned, she didn’t miss, she has no trouble at all hooking her arm over the banister and lurching her way over it to figure out her lungs in peace. More bruises, but nothing broken, she thinks.

Harley gets up, and then flinches when there’s a soft hiss and then a  _ clang  _ from beside her. A flash of metal—another grapple, its claws wrapped around the edge of the landing a floor below, before the hooks loosen and the rope dangles freely at her.

She wonders if Batman ever goes fishing when he’s not being Batman, or if this is just his equivalent. But—well, it’s faster than running up the steps, and she knows he won’t let her fall. Hell, she’d know that even if she hadn’t just told him his kid was in trouble, even if she was still a villain. He’d always been kind of a softie like that, not like she’d ever tell him that to his face. Er, cowl. Lenses?

Harley takes the rope, bites her lip as she considers it. The hooks are probably controlled at his end, and she’s not sure that any of her outfit is exactly weight-bearing anyway, so she can’t just hook it onto herself. There’s a decent grip to it, but like hell is she just going to hold it and hope it doesn’t slip right through her gloves as soon as she tries to step off the stairs. Instead, she just resorts to a combination—looping it under her belt, then around her waist a couple of times, and then using the rest of the slack to wind it around her arm until it feels like it’s probably not going anywhere without taking body parts with it.

“I hate you so much,” she tells the rope, and hopes like hell that Batman hasn’t installed any recording devices in the hook. And then, despite every instinct in her body telling her it’s a dumb idea, she climbs back off of the fire escape and pushes off of the railing.

The rope holds. Harley dangles for a second, trying to at least scoot away from the stairs so she doesn’t get her foot caught in them if she tries to—what, rappel up the side of the building? Climb?

And now she’s moving. She’s moving kind of faster than she wants to, actually, this is really terrible and she’d like it to stop now and now she’s thinking about what if it really genuinely takes her arm off—

The rope slows her ascent about the time she catches sight of the cowl’s silhouette. Her shoulder hits the corner of the rooftop, then her knee, and then finally her boot’s scraping against it and she’s scrabbling onto the concrete and trying to disentangle herself before she gets eaten by a grapnel gun. The second she does, the rope hisses back out of sight; the second  _ that _ happens, Batman turns and keeps walking. But at least he doesn’t jump off of this building too—yet, anyway.

He takes eight steps towards the center of the rooftop and then stops so suddenly Harley almost bumps into him. His cape doesn’t make a sound when he turns to face her again. “Talk,” he says.

It sounds just enough like a threat that she bristles on instinct. “It’s not my fault,” she says, and then realizes that maybe she should be quieter than that, just in case—well, just in case. Paranoia’s contagious, she guesses.

“I’m not saying it is,” Batman says. It doesn’t sound reassuring, but she’s… pretty sure he’s not mad at her? Mostly sure. She hopes she’s sure.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I called him to say hi, and he was talking kind of weird, so I went along with it, and then he did something to my phone—” pulls it out, hands it over before Batman can interrupt because she  _ knows _ he wants to the second the words come out—“and I’m pretty sure he asked me to find you.”

Batman looks up from his inspection of her phone. “Pretty sure?” he echoes.

Harley shrugs helplessly. “Either that or he actually wanted to introduce me to his real-life family and picked a weird time to say it,” she says.

Batman observes her for a few seconds without saying anything, then turns his attention back to the device in his hands. His mouth turns just slightly down at the corners, he taps a menu into existence and then out, and when he hands the phone back to her the tracker’s display is nowhere to be seen. Not an icon out of place.

“You won’t be needing that,” he says. He’s already ignoring her before she can even say anything, doing something incomprehensible to one of his gauntlets, sliding a hidden panel open and pressing a button inside it.

Because everyone just carries a freakin’ control panel inside their body armor, right? Harley slips her phone back into her pocket with what she thinks is a generously understated grimace, already preparing for a fight. She’s not sure what they’re going to fight  _ about _ yet, but there’s going to be one. She just knows it.

Harley hears it before she sees it, but only just. The Batwing still sounds like a plane, but it’s quieter than any plane has any right to be, shooting in from the western horizon and swooping around with an appropriate level of drama before lowering itself down onto the roof in a way that casually defies all physical laws about airplane landings that Harley knows of.

The cockpit pulls back. Harley takes a breath to start arguing.

“Get in,” Batman says, vaulting over the wing and into the pilot seat.

She blinks. “What?”

There’s no way to tell Batman’s facial expression by the line of his mouth. There’s probably no way to tell what it is even if he had the cowl off entirely. It doesn’t stop her from trying. “Get in, Harley,” he says, with an air of quickly evaporating patience.

Harley doesn’t need to be told a third time. Barely.

* * *

She doesn’t ask why she’s there because she’s pretty sure she won’t get an answer; Batman is downright  _ fidgety _ for a given measure of Batman, his fingertips drumming an arrhythmic staccato beat on the controls, and then stopping, and then starting again. Given everything else going on, she’s pretty sure that means he’s really,  _ really _ pissed off.

He did always seem like the quiet-fury type. Harley’s seen him shout, seen him incredibly angry, but whenever she imagined him  _ enraged _ it was always… silent. Cold. And much, much worse for it.

She doesn’t really want to start chatting right now if she’s right. Not because she thinks she’ll be caught in the crossfire, just…

Besides, there probably wouldn’t be time to ask anyway. The pitch of the Batwing changes fifteen seconds into the sixty-second flight, an extra little hum starting up that she doesn’t remember from the Louisiana trip. He flies low to the ground as soon as there aren’t buildings in the way, tracking west until he hits the river and then following it south until it dumps out into the bay. He parks the plane in a rocky little outcrop pretending it’s a beach, but he doesn’t open the roof again just yet.

“There are three gunmen with him,” Batman says. “More of them throughout. He doesn’t think they’ll try to shoot him, but we can’t take that risk. How quietly can you move?”

“Pretty quietly, I guess,” she says. And then: “Wait, how do you know that?”

He turns to look at her. She feels vaguely disapproved of. “Silent comms,” he says. “He couldn’t start it himself, but I could force his side to pick up.”

The tapping, she thinks. Oh.

“Count to thirty, then follow me,” he says. “If you find anyone I didn’t, nonlethal force  _ only _ . Understand?”

Harley isn’t really sure how to nonlethally knock someone out, but maybe she can tie them up or something. Probably best just to not get seen… so she probably shouldn’t be wearing red, in retrospect, but… whatever. She nods.

The Batwing slides back open. Batman hops out of it and disappears without a sound.

Thirty has never felt like such a long number to count to. Without him there to distract her, the whole worrying thing she shouldn’t be doing starts up again. Fidgeting in the Batplane feels like a really stupid idea, so she just straightens the line of her gloves, again and again and again.

She kind of wishes he hadn’t uninstalled the tracker. Okay, sure, it didn’t look like it had any weird life signs setting on it or anything, and it would probably keep broadcasting from a corpse, but

(don’t think about it)

she’d still feel better if she could at least see… something.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

Harley jumps out of the Batwing like it burns, half-running down the rocks in a nervous balance between being quiet and not falling over and getting to the lighthouse as fast as she can. She finds the door halfway around the structure, cracked open.

It’s dark when she goes inside, which at least helps with the not-being-spotted thing. She holds her breath as she steps forward, mostly shutting the door behind her, squinting uselessly in the sliver of moonlight left behind. The wall rasps against the fingertips of her gloves, so she stops using it as a guide beyond a quick touch every now and then.

Her toe hits a step. Harley stumbles, but doesn’t fall; she hesitates, checking to make sure that no other sounds start up, and then she fumbles for the banister and starts to climb.

On the second revolution of the spiral staircase, the floors give way to catwalks, as if the architects were originally going to do solid landings all the way up and then just gave up after a couple of rooms. At least there are windows now—smallish ones with thick panes, but windows nonetheless; there’s moonlight streaming inside now, lighting her way up the riserless steps.

And also lighting the suspiciously human shapes she can see hanging from the banisters every couple of floors, feet-first. One of them looks like they’re still struggling, but none of them make a sound.

Well… at least she doesn’t need to worry about them, even if it does kind of feel like there’s no point in her being here. She looks farther up, can just barely see a darker shape moving, almost at the top of the stairs. Harley starts climbing faster, sacrificing a little bit of her stealth since there’s apparently nobody capable of doing anything about it anyway.

She’s out of breath when she reaches the final landing. Batman isn’t.

“Freeing Nightwing is your priority,” he says, so quietly she can barely hear him from a foot away. “Leave everything else to me.”

She has a couple of concerns, but she nods anyway. Batman opens up one of the containers on his belt, slides out a little metal sphere, and ascends a couple more stairs. There’s a hatch at the very top, a slightly darker square of metal against the concrete ceiling; he pushes it open just barely enough to put the object through and roll it away.

He closes the door again. “Don’t panic,” he says flatly, and Harley has no idea why—and then there’s a  _ sound _ , not a gunshot (she knows it isn’t, she knows it isn’t, there’s no need for every single part of her head to start shouting at her that it is) but a pop so loud that it almost hurts even with the door in the way. Her heart lurches in her chest and she grips the banister, crouching low as if the stairs are going to give out because of a little flashbang on the other side of the damn floor, and Batman swings the hatch back open and vanishes through it before she even has time to take a breath.

Free Nightwing. Okay. She scrambles the rest of the way up the steps. There’s shouting, but no gunfire; these guys aren’t quite dumb enough to start shooting before they can even see what’s going on, which is at least something. Someone crashes into her but she rolls with it, jumping so she can twist herself over their shoulder and land on her feet while they fall.

Harley presses herself against the window and lets herself take stock of the situation. It’s a pretty big lighthouse, but there’s still not much room to maneuver around the massive pedestal holding the lamp. She’s kind of expecting Nightwing to be tied up to the light itself, but she can’t see him over there, and—

There’s another pop and then a continuous hiss, and the room starts filling with smoke. Batman swoops past in a swirl of cape and fury. “Two o’clock,” he says, tackling one of the mooks to the floor and twisting her arm behind her back. “On the railing.” He leans sharply to the side, there’s a crunch and then a scream, and Harley gets just the slightest thought of  _ shoulders aren’t supposed to bend that way  _ before the smoke swallows them both up.

“What?” she says. And then: right, yes, okay, she knows how this works. She keeps one hand on the window, trails it down until she feels a handhold, and follows it around until her foot hits something soft.

“Ow,” says Nightwing.

Harley winces, dropping down to her knees as quickly as she can without falling on him. She can kind of see him now that she’s closer, the lamp’s slowly revolving light piercing through the haze in waves. He looks—he looks not great, but he looks alive, and that’s the part she really cares about. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to step on you, hon.”

Nightwing moves his head in her general direction. “Harley,” he says. He sounds kinda surprised, but… pleasantly so, maybe? Definitely not  _ un _ pleasantly so.

“Yeah,” she agrees. She doesn’t have nearly as many gadgets with her as Batman does and absolutely never will, but she did think to bring a pair of scissors. Half-blind, she runs her hand down his shoulder to his arm until she finds a knot… and then another one… and then another one. “These guys like their overkill, huh?”

Nightwing chuckles, tight and exhausted, his head falling back against the railing as he breathes. “It wasn’t that thorough until after you called,” he says. “They had to let me have a hand back to answer the comm and I guess that made them nervous.” He clears his throat. “And they might have noticed that the first attempt was a little looser than it was when they’d left it.”

Harley makes a halfhearted attempt to untie one of the knots properly before just giving up and using the scissors on it. Carefully, since she can’t see and she’s pretty sure poor Nightwing is battered enough without her stabbing him by accident. “Sorry about that,” she says.

“Don’t be.” His voice is warm in a way she doesn’t know how to think about. “Trust me, I’m glad to have help here. Not so glad about the grenade, but  _ that _ I was expecting.”

These bastards had good taste in ropes. She was honestly kind of hoping for duct tape; she knows what to do about that. “What, you thought I’d call Bats up and then just wander back home?”

“More that he’d just fly off without y— _ gah _ ,” he says, his entire body tensing up, and Harley drops the scissors.

“You okay?” she asks. “Did I get you?” It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind, so… 

Nightwing shakes his head mutely. Something heavy hits the floor on the other side of the lighthouse. “No,” he says, after a slightly worrying pause. “And no. Just tried to move my arm wrong, that’s all.”

She kind of wants to get up and help Batman out with the whole beating-the-shit-out-of-everyone-in-sight thing, but. Priorities. Harley gives up on the scissors too, pulling both gloves off and picking at the least complicated-looking of the bonds. “Gotta say,” she says, as she finally starts making a little headway, “I’m a little jealous. I mean, I thought I was the only one allowed to do this to you.” Is that weird to say? Is that  _ bad _ to say, with him still very clearly tied up and very clearly in pain and not okay with either of those things right now?

“Hnh,” Nightwing says. It kind of sounds like amusement, so she thinks she’s probably safe. “Don’t worry, Harl. I’m not planning on making a habit of this.” The first major tangle pops free; he hisses in a breath, but it only takes a couple of seconds for him to start talking this time. “And at least you  _ ask _ first. After the first time, anyway.”

He means it to be teasing and she knows it, but she winces a little all the same. “Yeah,” she says. “Not the best time to start hitting on you, huh?”

“Hey, I didn’t say no,” Nightwing says. “In fact, I’m  _ pretty _ sure I said I wanted to. To not say no, I mean. Or just to—” He cuts himself off. “I should probably stop talking now.”

She gets his elbows free and moves on to his wrists. His wrists, which… are both bound  _ and _ cuffed, because that’s totally reasonable. “I don’t know,” she says. “Bats seems pretty busy over there.” He also seems… way less efficient than he was with the people on the stairs. Okay, sure, the people on the stairs didn’t see him coming and couldn’t fight back, but she’s had her lights punched out by Batman before and he’s usually pretty quick about it. So either these particular guys are giving him more trouble than all the rest of them, or…

“Too busy to start getting nosy?”

Harley considers this. “Okay, yeah, you’ve got a point.” The last coil of rope starts to unravel. “So what did these guys want with you, anyway? Figured anyone who could take down a superhero should probably just shoot them, but—”

“Oh, like  _ you’re _ one to talk.”

“Hey, the farthest I ever got up the food chain was sidekick. It wasn’t up to me, Joker was crazy, and Pam was probably just worried about the pollution from the gun smoke or somethin’.” Harley pulls out the bobby pin holding her bangs out of her face and begins to mutilate it.

Nightwing huffs out another careful laugh. “Bounty hunters,” he says. “Freelancers, I think. Keeping me alive for someone to get an expensive revenge fantasy, volcanoes and monologues, that kind of thing.”

Jabbing the pin into somebody’s eye would technically still be nonlethal, Harley thinks wistfully. She takes out her frustration on the cuffs’ lock instead. For several moments, there is absolute silence but for the clicking of the makeshift lockpick and the muffled sound of Batman carrying someone downstairs. Probably to complete the collection of battered upside-down people down there.

She really hopes so.

“Hey,” Nightwing says gently. Harley looks at him with a start, sees him watching her. “I’m okay, Harley. Really.”

She stares resolutely at the cuffs, twisting the pick. They’re pretty high-quality, actually, which… sucks a whole lot of ass. “You don’t look okay,” she mutters, trying to keep her voice at a normal tone instead of whatever it was that made him figure out she was worried about him. Which she wasn’t—

Which she shouldn’t have been.

“I’ve had better days,” he agrees. “But I’ve also had worse. It’s fine.”

“It’s  _ not _ fine,” she insists. Her voice goes up half an octave. Now that the immediate danger has passed, all of the tension that was focusing her before starts doing its best to throw her off balance and do the exact opposite. “If I hadn’t called you when I did—”

“Then I would have figured something else out. Or Batman would have noticed I hadn’t moved in a while and I don’t usually have a reason to come to a lighthouse, or someone would have picked up their radio chatter, or something.” She’s pretty sure that she’s not the one who should be comforted right now, but she appreciates the effort, she guesses. “You just happened to happen first, that’s all. I mean, I’m glad, but…”

“Okay,” Harley says, mostly so he’ll stop talking. “Okay.”

The moment the cuffs slip free, he cups the back of her head with his hand and kisses her. “Thanks,” he murmurs into her mouth.

She tastes blood. She’s pretty sure it’s his. “Don’t thank me yet,” she says. “We’ve still got to get you downstairs.”

She feels his lips curve against hers. “Is this a bad time to mention that they tied my legs up too?”

* * *

Batman comes back from whatever he was doing with the mostly-unconscious bounty hunters in time to procure a particularly sharp batarang from somewhere on his person and saw through the rest of the knots so fast that Harley honestly wonders why she’s even necessary. “Injuries?” he says, and at first she instinctively thinks that wow, would he drop dead on the spot of he just asked if Nightwing was okay, but… she thinks she’s starting to figure out what some of his one-word moods mean. He sounds brisk, yeah, but for once the flatness sounds a little bit manufactured.

(She wonders how much of it is at all the other times.)

“Lots,” Nightwing says. “Gonna need your help with a shoulder, but I can walk. I think.”

Batman  _ hmm _ s low in his throat, repositioning to kneel at Nightwing’s side. He touches something on his cowl and the lenses fuzz out, brightening a little. “Looks bad,” he says.

“Doesn’t feel great,” Nightwing agrees.

“On three,” Batman says, reaching for the arm. Harley backs up instinctively even though she’s not even close to being in the way.

“It’s not going to be on three,” Nightwing grouches.

“One,” says Batman.

“I really don’t know why you’re even trying—”

“Two.”

“—to do this. I can keep from tensing up even if I know it’s coming—”

“Three,” Batman finishes, and twists one hand while pushing with the other until something pops and Nightwing gasps out a curse.

“ _ Screw _ you,” he says, surprisingly mildly in Harley’s opinion, cradling his arm against his chest. “You did that just to prove me wrong, didn’t you?”

Batman stands. “Not just,” he says, offering a hand up. Nightwing takes it, even if he still looks a little betrayed when he does. “How are your legs?”

Nightwing takes an experimental step. He looks a little unsteady, but for all Harley knows it’s from exhaustion more than pain. “Not broken,” he says.

Batman considers this. For a second it almost looks like he’s planning on picking him up and carrying him downstairs anyway, but he doesn’t. “Take it slowly,” he says. “Do you need help with the stairs?”

“One way to find out,” Nightwing says, and heads for the hatch.

* * *

He probably does need help with the stairs, but he keeps on insisting that he doesn’t the whole way down, and she can’t get to his less injured side to prop him up under the guise of being cuddly-ish because he’s bracing his good shoulder against the wall. The second they all make it outside, though, she absolutely tucks herself underneath the arm that didn’t just get bodily shoved back into place. He gives her a look that says he definitely knows what she’s trying to accomplish, but he leans into her anyway.

Harley assumes that she just misremembered where the Batwing was parked until a hum that she didn’t realize was there suddenly stops and it ripples into view thirty feet away.

“Oh,” she says. “I’ve never seen it do that before.” And… of course she hasn’t. That kind of kills the purpose of it having some kind of stealth mode in the first place, and how is that even a thing that it can do?

Nightwing chuckles. “Neat trick, huh?” He takes a breath. It sounds a little uncomfortable, but he doesn’t comment on it and neither does she. “Doesn’t work as well in the daytime, but he doesn’t usually need it to then.”

Yeah, stuff in Gotham usually goes down pretty late. Sometimes it feels like she’s still getting her sleep schedule under control.

Not that this is helping.

“You need help getting in there?” she asks, fully intending on doing it no matter what he says. She can feel a sticky dampness starting to seep through the shoulder of her outfit and she knows for damn sure that she’s not the one bleeding. He’d probably tell her if he were straight-up dying, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to get him to a hospital or something as soon as possible.

“Probably.” The plane opens up. Nightwing looks at it. “Yeah,” he says.

She’s kind of expecting Batman to take over before she can even look like she’s helping, but he just stands on the cockpit and helps steady Nightwing into his own seat after Harley helps him onto the wing. Trying to get inside the plane without accidentally kicking him in the face (or worse, the shoulder) is a little tricky, but not unmanageably so.

“So, uh,” she says as the Batwing closes up and pushes itself into the sky. “Now what?”

“Now,” Batman says, “we take you home. And then we get Nightwing back to the Cave.”

“Can I—” is out of Harley’s mouth before she can realize how stupid it is.

At least Batman waits a second to see if she interrupts herself before he does it for her. “No.”

She holds her breath, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Okay,” she says.

They spend the rest of the trip in silence, but it’s not all that surprising given the fact that it’s not a long one. The Batwing lands on her roof so gently that she barely even feels it, which she’s sure Nightwing is glad of. And—and she has no idea what the protocol is here. She’s pretty sure—no, she is completely, 100% sure that she’s never gone on a rescue mission before. Ever. Much less has she been dropped off at home like she hitched a ride with a friend’s parent after school. Is there hugging or something?

Nobody else stands up when she does, so probably a no on the hugging thing. Which is probably for the best, because she doesn’t know what other parts of Nightwing got messed up, and she definitely doesn’t want to make them worse.

“So,” she says. “See you?”

Batman grunts noncommittally. Nightwing gives her a tired smile. “See you,” he replies. His fingers catch against hers as she clambers past him to slide out of the plane, but he doesn’t do anything else.

She definitely doesn’t stand just outside the door to the roof and watch them fly back out west. It’s not as though it makes any difference, and definitely not as though she can figure out where they’re going just by seeing the direction they vanish in.

Although if Bats sees her staring, he might not want to take that risk.

Harley goes inside before she loses track of them in the night sky.

* * *

Laundry is her first priority. It’s not the first time that Nightwing has left DNA samples in her home, but it’s the first time he’s done it after he got kidnapped and the everliving shit beaten out of him, so she’s damn well going to be paranoid here. She breaks out the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, washes the bloody patches of her clothing in the kitchen sink, dumps them in her regular hamper for the purpose of stealth, and then bleaches the sink. A lot.

And then she walks to the laundromat at almost eleven and watches the washer like someone’s going to try and steal her clothes when her back is turned. Like there’s even anybody else  _ in _ the laundromat in the first place except the old guy behind the counter. But hey, all shapes and sizes, right? Could be a spy or something—

“Snap out of it, Harley,” she mutters to herself. The old guy gives her a look. She glares at him until he stops.

The exhaustion starts to set in about five minutes before her clothes are done with the rinse cycle. She doesn’t even bother drying them; she can hang them over her curtain rods. It’s not as though she can mess the floor up any  _ more,  _ nor would anybody give a damn if she did.

Harley walks back home, locks the door behind her, and hopes that a decent night’s sleep will take care of the yawning feeling in her gut that she’s doing something terribly wrong.

Except she doesn’t get that far. The second she takes a step away from her front door and drops her laundry bag on her sofa, a small, dark shape whizzes through her cracked kitchen window. Harley yelps, throwing herself to the side as the thing clangs off her fridge, dislodging a magnet, and clatters to the floor.

It's a batarang. On one side, in preternaturally neat capital letters, are the words “CLOCK TOWER - MIDNIGHT”.

It’s 11:42.

Harley grits her teeth, snatching it up and getting to her feet. She shoves the whole front half of her body out of the window, shakes the batarang at the (empty) alleyway, and shouts.

_ “I have a door, jackass!” _


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightwing actually takes painkillers when he's hurt like a reasonable person, Batman tries to be supportive, Harley has about 50 panic attacks, and Poison Ivy puts in an appearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: okay I can at least finish this in four chapters, right? I can do that?  
> also me: let's include five extra scenes and
> 
> Also, I tried really, really hard to figure out where in the general Batman timeline B&HQ falls... and then discovered that nobody really seems to know, so I just arbitrarily plopped it somewhere pre-Damian and called it a day.
> 
> (Not that I don't love Damian. I do. He is a good boy despite everything and I adore him with all my heart, but I feel like he probably would have shown up if he were there.)

_Clock tower_ doesn't narrow it down, not in Gotham. _Midnight_ does, though… she thinks. Batman is kind of a jerk, but he's not a jerk in that way—the “asking you to do the legitimately impossible, then acting like you're the unreasonable one for failing, _Harley_ ” way.

Probably. Unless he makes special exceptions for people he doesn’t approve of who happen to be getting a little closer than they should to his kid. Except—that doesn’t quite make sense either, because he let her come along on the rescue mission. _Asked_ her to come along, in that weird gruff way that made everything sound like an order even when it shouldn’t have been. So it’s not that he… exactly…

Thinking about it isn’t going to help. She tied herself up in enough knots trying to understand Batman’s next move back when she was still running with—with the wrong crowd; it’s an exercise in futility and she should have figured that out a long time ago.

Harley momentarily considers changing clothes again, but—11:43—she doesn’t have time, especially not if she’s still in the same headspace that gave her an emotional breakdown in front of her old costume. It’s not as though she has a secret identity to protect, anyway; the very first thing the Joker took away from her was her name.

So Harley jams the batarang into her pocket, climbs out of her window and rattles down the fire escape in jeans and a t-shirt. There’s no one on the street to give her a second glance.

She runs and aggressively jaywalks the eight blocks to the nearest structure resembling a clock tower and arrives with a little over thirteen minutes to climb to the top—because of course Batman, being himself, couldn’t just wait on the ground outside. Or give her a hand up again. She doesn’t even know why she bothered to check.

Should have been faster, she muses, but then: no, she shouldn’t have. She’s out of practice, _badly_. She just spent half the night running around, crouching, trying to prop up an injured man a full head taller than her. She’s exhausted, her ribs still hurt from her slips early in the night, and food service is rougher on her ankles than crime ever was.

 _Fuck_ Batman, she thinks fiercely, rubbing her face. Harley gives a cursory look around the street for possible witnesses, but finds none. There’s a security camera across the street, but it’s motionless, the lens pointing closer to the street than anything else. She thinks she can maybe see a stylized bat stuck in the wall next to it, a slow red light pulsing like a heartbeat.

Harley takes a chance and trusts him, slipping a second bobby pin out of her hair and destroying it the same as the first. It’s an old building, a nearly-derelict church that’s trying to look like a cathedral and succeeding only because of Gotham’s architecture. It has a regular lock, totally unremarkable and ludicrously easy to get past.

Although, to be fair, Batman’s right about a few things—most criminals are pretty damn superstitious. Hell, Harley can get a little cautious about stuff. The kind of Gothamite bad guys that wouldn’t balk at breaking into a church are also the kind that wouldn’t balk at just breaking down the door, or blowing it up, or something.

But… well, Harley’s on a mission. And also Jewish, even if she’s kinda terrible at it and hasn’t kept kosher since the first time she smelled a cheeseburger. So it’s fine.

The church is very church-y, if not particularly large. There’s an actual, real organ off to one side of the altar, which Harley personally thinks is a pretty nice touch… but also totally irrelevant, because what she’s really going for is the unassuming little door immediately to her right when the entrance swings shut behind her. The smooth stone tiles give way to a narrow set of stairs almost immediately, making it a little awkward to pull the side-door closed when she enters.

And now the hard part. Or at least the annoying part. The tower itself is impossibly slender, forcing the flights to stop and turn around after only a few steep steps and lending the whole place an air of something that was just begging to collapse. The floor creaks under her feet every time she tries to take a step anywhere but the edges, the sticky-varnished wood flexing beneath her in the centers. At least there are risers, she muses; she’s totally fine with heights, obviously, but that doesn’t mean she likes this even a little.

“This had better be really freaking important,” she mutters to herself as she checks the time and reluctantly quickens her pace. Her voice echoes against the stone walls way more than she was expecting. Harley winces and really hopes that the church is too small to also house the priest’s quarters, and also that the acoustics aren’t quite crazy enough to carry that far if it isn’t.

And then, all at once, the stairs stop. Harley rests her hand on the floor above as the railing unceremoniously vanishes in a way that doesn’t seem exactly up to OSHA specs—but then, it’s hardly the worst bit of flaunting she’s ever seen in Gotham, so she can’t justify judging it too much.

Either the clockwork is way smaller than she’s expecting or it’s mostly hidden in the ceiling, because there’s way more room on the top floor than there was at any point in the stairwell. She can hear it, just faintly, the sounds of metal slotting into itself, ponderously turning. The clock faces themselves are frosted glass, lit from outside but not from within, casting the shadows of its hands inside the room from three sides—and the impossibly large figure of Batman silhouetted against the fourth.

Harley rolls her eyes. “You ever get tired of looming in weird spots, Bats?” she says. She’s out of breath, but she refuses to feel bad about it.

“No,” Batman answers. Is that amusement?

The minute hand reaches midnight. Harley momentarily fears for the safety of her eardrums, but no bells toll—maybe because there’s no room for them in this tiny-ass tower, maybe because there are too many residential-ish buildings in the area that would get pissy at having to hear it at all hours of the night. Maybe both.

“Okay,” she says. “It’s midnight. I’m here. What do you want?”

Batman remains silent for a second. “Nightwing hasn’t told you who he is,” he says.

It isn’t a question. “Nope,” Harley answers anyway.

The cape shifts from where it’s mantled around him, but there’s no wind up here to move it, and he doesn’t otherwise move. “There’s something you have to understand,” he says. His voice is soft, quiet, but Harley finds herself unaccountably tense anyway. “If you knew, you would know who all of us were. Oracle, Batgirl, Red Hood… every single one of us.”

Ah. Harley bites her tongue for a second. “I wasn’t gonna ask,” she says. “I dunno if this came across, but I’m not _dating_ the guy. We’re just—”

Batman’s looking at her. She falters.

“—never mind,” she finishes, because there’s no way she’s going to try and explain casual sex to _Batman._ It’s just weird. “Point is, it’s not like that. I don’t need to know who he is.”

It’s basically impossible to see behind the lenses of Batman’s cowl at the best of times. Now, in the semi-light coming from too many directions, it’s a totally flat and unblinking stare. “Maybe not,” he agrees. “But he trusts you, Harley.”

Her skin prickles. “He hacked my phone and told me to find you,” she says. (And he took the mask off in front of her, sent her pictures from times he was being a civilian, took her to one of his hideouts, fell asleep next to her—) “He didn’t have to _trust_ me for that,” Harley insists, mostly to herself, not even really sure why she’s arguing the point. “It’s not like he had too many options to ask for help, you know?”

Batman lets her finish, then ignores everything she just said as steadfastly as if he’d interrupted. “Nightwing trusts you,” he says. “And I’m—” There’s that cape twitch again. Is he… He’s not nervous. That’s ridiculous. Batman doesn’t _fidget._ “Trying to be better about trusting him solo.”

Harley’s mouth is impossibly dry. “So…?” she says. “This isn’t a therapy session, is it? Because that was never my thing, and I don’t have any credentials at all anymore.”

“No,” Batman says. He sounds a little annoyed, but Harley paradoxically finds that a lot more reassuring than… whatever the hell he’s being the rest of the time today. Speaking of which: “I just wanted you to understand exactly what I meant when I told you that, if you ever _do_ feel the need to know who he is under the mask, I’ll let you start digging.”

Oh. _Oh._

She’s pretty sure her voice sounds normal when she replies, but it’s… yeah, there’s no way she’d be able to tell either way. She’s not even listening to herself. “You couldn’t stop me if I tried,” Harley says. “I mean, people try to dig stuff up on you guys all the time.”

“They do,” Batman agrees. “And when someone gets too close to the truth, I misdirect them. I won’t do that with you.”

Harley almost asks if he has something set up back home to track every single person taking wild guesses at his identity on the Internet, then realizes that he probably does. _God._ She tries to will her blood to start going to her extremities again; her fingertips are freezing. “Let me get this straight,” she says, as if that’s a possibility at this point. “You aren’t going to give me a hint or anything, you just… won’t try to _stop_ me from figuring it out myself. When nobody who’s not a super-something has gotten it right in what, fifteen years?”

“Civilians have gotten it right before,” Batman corrects. His voice is perfectly calm and even. They might as well be discussing this over coffee or something. She tries to imagine him tucked into one of the not-actually-comfy chairs at some hipster place, sipping something in his cowl. Part of her brain fractures. “They just never had enough proof of it to be dangerous.”

“I’m not a detective,” she protests. “I’m not even a conspiracy theorist.”

“You graduated top of your class,” Batman says. “The University of Gotham isn’t the most… incorruptible place of learning, but cheating and bribery doesn’t take anyone that far. You put in the work, and you were good at it.”

Nightwing telling her that she was smart is one thing. Batman doing it, like he’s rattling off facts from a freakin’ news article, is another. It’s a lot less comfortable to listen to, for one thing.

“Damn it, Bats,” she says faintly. “I’m a doctor, not a private investigator.”

The side of his mouth twitches up and then stays there. “True,” he agrees. “But you’re stubborn enough for one.” And then he just… sweeps past her and down the stairs before she can even begin to formulate a reply.

Harley stays there for several silent minutes before she can collect herself enough to follow.

* * *

Harley wakes up to the sound of someone rattling around in the kitchen, but that’s only to be expected. She turns over in the navy blue sheets, pulls the pillow from his side over onto hers and tries to smother herself with it.

It only takes him twenty seconds to come over and screw it up, but at least he nudges her hand with a thick porcelain mug after he pulls the pillow away from it. Harley pushes herself up onto her elbow, scowling, her eyelids firmly shut against the sunlight streaming in from the open window.

“I hate you,” she says, blindly fumbling for the mug’s handle. Coffee. She takes a sip—cream and enough sugar to make an entire candy store flinch. “I love you,” she corrects, sitting up all the way just so she can curl around it like someone’s going to take it away at any moment.

He laughs, just a quiet little puff of breath, ruffling her hair when he kisses the top of her head. “Whatever you say,” he says. She feels colder when he moves away, but the coffee helps that too.

Harley drinks it greedily, burning her tongue less than she should, and wordlessly holds it out with her eyes still closed.

“Nope,” comes his voice from across the room. “I’m only your personal barista if you bribe me.”

“But,” she says. “You make it better than I do.”

“It’s milk and sugar, Harl, not advanced chemistry.”

He’s _heartless._ Harley has no choice but to open her eyes just to try and pout properly at him, but either he saw that coming or he really is that preoccupied with scrambling those eggs. And now her eyes are open and she just has to deal with that fact.

Part of her registers that it’s not her old apartment. It looks exactly like Nightwing’s hideout, but it hasn’t been that for a long time; there’s her table in the kitchen, the chair she scavenged off of the corner of Trident and Crowley, a second not-quite-matching chair from somewhere else. The stove is battered, but functional still. The fridge makes a reassuring hum when he opens it to bring out a little carton of heavy cream. Harley swings her legs over the side of the bed with a little grumble, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders and untucking it from the foot of the bed when she stands up. (What kind of dork actually makes their bed properly, anyway? Especially what kind of dork actually makes their bed when he _knows_ that she’s going to use the blanket as a portable cocoon every single morning without fail?)

The wooden floor of the main area is fine, but the tile in the kitchenette is annoyingly cold on her bare feet. Harley wrinkles her nose, putting her cup on the countertop and huddling up behind him for warmth, tucking her head between his shoulders and closing her eyes.

“That won’t work either,” he says. She can hear his smile in his voice.

Harley makes an irritated sound into his t-shirt. (This is when it happens, she knows. Maybe not this instant, maybe not this time, but this is when it happens.) “Worth a shot,” she hears her own voice say.

He snickers. (Here it comes—) He pokes the eggs with his spatula, scrubbing them absently around the skillet, splashing a little more cream into them and mixing it in as it starts sizzling.

“There enough in there for me too?” Harley asks hopefully, pushing up on her toes to tuck her chin against his shoulder. He isn’t wearing his mask. His eyes are beautifully, perfectly blue behind the thick curve of his eyelashes. (His skin is a normal color. There’s a soft crinkle at the side of his mouth, but it’s just gently pink, not blood on snow. Not one of those, then.)

“Only if you ask nicely,” he says.

Harley ducks under his arm, turns his head with a hand on his chin, coaxes him into a coffee-scented kiss. His fingers find her waist, the small of her back, curving her body obliquely away from the stovetop. (There is no shadow over his shoulder. A bullet hole, a knife wound, a crowbar does not sprout from his throat. Not one of those either.) She pulls away, and he’s just silently looking at her like she’s something that shouldn’t be his and he can’t quite believe it yet. Her heart does something stupid and ordinary.

“Or you could do that,” he says. He grins (his mouth does not split his head across the middle, yawn out into something dark and inhuman with too many teeth and too little skin) and kisses her temple before letting her go.

Harley stands mutely, watching him as he flicks the stove off, fetches a pair of bowls from the cabinet, and pours the eggs evenly between them. He pauses to put the skillet and spatula both into the sink, run the water over it to scrape the residue from the bottom, and then leave it there.

(She doesn’t know what to do.) She grabs the salt and he takes the pepper, and then they switch. They ignore the table, just standing there in the kitchenette eating their eggs in companionable silence. (Nothing happens.)

He finishes eating before she does, slips his bowl and fork in the dishwasher. “Gotta go,” he says. He’s wearing his suit, holding his mask. He presses it to his face. (It doesn’t devour him.) “Love you,” he says, leaning in to kiss her cheek. (He doesn’t lash out over some imagined slight. He doesn’t attack her because she’s there. The police don’t kick down the door with their guns drawn, and he doesn’t hold her up against his chest to take the bullets for him.)

“Love you too,” her mouth says. “Be careful.”

He gives her a little salute. “Always am,” he says, and leaps through the window. Harley takes a few steps forward, watching. (He doesn’t careen out of the sky. He doesn’t crunch against the wall, ragdoll his way to the pavement in five more pieces than he started with.) He fires his grapnel at the building across the street, rappels gracefully up the side of it, darts out of sight.

(It’s none of those things.)

Harley lurches awake, sitting up before her eyes are even open. Her skin is drenched and clammy, her pulse rabbiting against her ribs like it’s trying to escape her body. She sucks in a breath, another, but it just makes her dizzier. Her eyes sting.

Okay. Okay. Harley closes her eyes again. Diaphragmatic breathing, _slowly,_ hold it—one, two, three—exhale—one, two, three, four, five, six… and again, and again, until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

She covers her face with her hands. The sun isn’t even up yet, but like hell is she going to try again. Not tonight.

Harley pulls the blanket with her when she gets out of bed.

* * *

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[8.49 AM] morning

You  
[8.50 AM] Hey  
[8.50 AM] Feeling better?

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[8.51 AM] worse but I’ll be okay 

You  
[8.51 AM] :C

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[8.52 AM] quit worrying ♥  
[8.53 AM] I’m under house arrest and Alfred is feeding me painkillers every time I breathe funny

You  
[8.53 AM] Good  
[8.54 AM] Alfred?

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.00 AM] he made the soup

You  
[9.01 AM] Thought that was your gramps  
[9.01 AM] Wait  
[9.01 AM] Is alfred a batty codename

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.02 AM] omgf  
[9.02 AM] yeah, Alfredman  
[9.03 AM] this is too  
[9.03 AM] help

You  
[9.05 AM] Thats the painkillers sweetie ;3

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.05 AM] :[

You  
[9.06 AM] Go to sleep  
[9.06 AM] You can talk more about alfredman when youre not high off your ass

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.07 AM] I just woke up  
[9.07 AM] and I probably won’t want to talk about anything I just said

You  
[9.07 AM] Make him take your phone  
[9.07 AM] Painkiller dialing is worse than drunk dialing  
[9.07 AM] TRUST me

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.08 AM] I do  
[9.08 AM] but then I won’t be able to talk to you :[

You  
[9.12 AM] I have to work anyway  
[9.12 AM] Dork  
[9.13 AM] Now give alfredman your phone before you start saying really stupid shit

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[3.39 PM] we’re never talking about anything I say this week again, right?

You  
[6.05 PM] Only every day for the rest of your life :3

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.06 PM] :[[[[[

* * *

Harley doesn’t go home straight away. This… all of this, everything, is too damn much for her to deal with right now. She can’t—

She can’t.

Harley sits alone in the back room of the Midnight Brews coffee shop around the corner from Superbabes. The chair is really terrible, but the coffee is okay. It’s even more okay with the whole enough-caffeine-to-give-an-elephant-a-heart-attack thing, because for some reason trying to work an entire shift on maybe three hours of sleep was a bad time, and she’s honestly not sure how easily she’d make it home without something.

The anxiety of the morning hadn’t gone away, just receded enough to let her function. It’s still there, nagging at her, like her soul is itching underneath her skin. She keeps spinning her phone in her fingers, but she’s already been through her list of contacts ten times and the only person on there she can still honestly consider a friend… is also the source of her current predicament, even if it’s only indirectly.

Okay, maybe not the _source._ But definitely the cause of its current flare-up.

Her heart skitters out of rhythm for a couple of seconds before settling down to a normal, fast patter. On second thought, maybe espresso in the middle of a day-long anxiety attack wasn’t the best idea she’s ever had in her life.

Harley presses the edge of her phone to her forehead, furrowing her brow. (She can’t just… not talk to anyone. This kind of shit isn’t going away easy or she wouldn’t even be here right now. She already tried outrunning it, and look where _that_ got her.)

Pam is the only other option she possibly has. They still haven’t talked since the last… incident, and for all Harley knows the number doesn’t even work anymore—for all she knows, Poison Ivy didn’t surreptitiously sneak off while they were torching the Floronic Man, and the phone is stuck in a locker somewhere in Arkham right now—but there isn’t anyone else. She unlocks her phone, hits her (deeply fake) name in the contacts list, and tries not to hold her breath while it rings.

There’s a click. “Harley?” Pam says. Her voice is a little tense, but not in a distracted way or a please-leave-me-alone way.

Harley swallows half her throat. “Hey,” she says. “Look, I know we’ve been kind of… you know, and stuff, but can we just… can we just skip the talking through it for a little bit?”

“Harl…” She shuts her eyes, not sure exactly what to do with the concern in that voice. “What’s wrong? What do you need?”

“I don’t know,” Harley says. “I mean, I do know. I, uhm. Can we meet? I’m not in trouble or anything. Not, like… normal trouble, at least.”

There’s shuffling from the other end of the line. “I can leave in two minutes. Where do you need me?”

Harley tries not to cry with relief and fails.

* * *

Pam steps through the door twenty minutes later. She’s wearing a dark green turtleneck, her skin either having changed color completely (Harley has no idea how most of her abilities work, honestly) or covered with stage makeup so perfectly that it looks almost normal. The faint, weird cast to her face could just be crappy lighting, if Harley didn’t know better.

She’s spotted instantly, but Pam goes through the motions of stepping up to the counter, speaking quietly to the cashier; when she finally does approach, she’s holding a disposable cup roiling with steam, a little pyramid-shaped teabag bobbing along inside it. The scientist steps around the tangle of tables and chairs to the empty seat beside Harley and sits down.

“Now,” she says. Her voice is calm, but her eyes aren’t. “What do you need? Are you alright?”

Harley giggles into what’s left of her coffee. “No,” she says. “This is gonna take a minute to explain, so I’m gonna need you to hear me out, okay?”

The line between Pam’s eyebrows furrows a little deeper, but: “Of course,” she says.

Which means that she has to figure out how to explain it in the first place. “So,” she says. “So there’s this guy—”

Instantly, Pamela tenses up. The fern in the corner that Harley was _really sure_ was fake seems to bristle. “Oh, Harl, no,” she says.

“It’s not like that,” Harley insists. “That’s just the problem. It started out as—nothing, y’know, just a ‘hey you’re cute and you think I’m cute, wanna have some nice old-fashioned kinda-hatesex so I don’t get desperate enough to lower my standards for actual dating’ kinda thing. And it was fine, so I let it keep happening, and then I freaked out and then I came back and he let me, and then I kind of ended up helping him not get killed or something—”

“You put the costume back on? For him?” And right, yeah, of course Pamela would get the significance of that.

Harley titters, high-pitched and terrible. “That’s not the bad part,” she says. “He already knew about that. And it wasn’t the first time he’d seen me in it.”

Pamela, by nature, can’t blanch anymore unless you actually dipped her in boiling water. It still looks like she would if she could, though. “He’s not from—from your workplace, is he? Please tell me he isn’t.”

“He’s not,” Harley answers with a sharp-edged cheerfulness. The hollow between her lungs is starting to come back. She grips the handle of her mug like a weapon. “It’s way worse than that. Like, take the worst possible scenario that could make sense, and then take it a step worse.”

Pam thinks. And then, all at once, that little crease on her forehead evens out and all that’s left is horror. “Harley,” she says softly. “You didn’t go back t—”

“Nooo, no no no,” Harley’s quick to correct, jerking her hand to the side in an abortive motion. “Okay, not _that_ bad, geez. He’s never been in Arkham. At least not on that side of a cell.”

A second of silence, and then Pam’s eyes go sharp. “You didn’t—” She stops, lowers her voice so soft that Harley can barely even hear it. “Nightwing?”

Harley smiles wanly. “Got it in two,” she says.

Pam takes a sip of her tea and looks away. “It’s better than Batman himself, I suppose,” she mutters. “But Harl, you have to know this is a bad idea.”

Harley stares at her cup. It’s almost empty. “It wasn’t supposed to be,” she says. “I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be _anything._ ”

“But it is now.”

“I don’t know?” Harley makes a helpless noise. “We’ve been talking. We’re friends now, I guess. He’s nice, and he’s not even been a little bit of an asshole about _anything_ and he freakin’ took care of me when I was laid out for a week with the flu or something. And I know that’s bad, but Pammie, I’m not… I’m not having nightmares about him anymore.”

Pamela goes very still. “And what about him?” she asks, finally. “You like him, and he…?”

“We’re friends,” Harley says again, confused. “I mean, he doesn’t _not_ like me. We cuddled once?”

“No, I didn’t mean that.” Pam whirls the stir-stick through her tea a couple of times, watches the bag spin. “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, Harley—”

“If I didn’t want pessimism about my taste in guys, I woulda called somebody else.”

“I suppose. But have you ever actually talked about this? If it started out as… stress relief—which does have its uses for humans, by the way. I’m not arguing your tactics—and you never discussed it since, then that’s probably what it still is. Correct?”

“I guess?” Harley isn’t sure where this is going, but she doesn’t think she’ll like it.

Pamela shrugs one shoulder. “You don’t know how he feels,” she says. “Maybe he cares about you as a friend—” and it sounds like she’s trying, it really does, but her tone just barely betrays her skepticism on that front—“but doesn’t see you as anything else. Maybe he won’t.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “For all you know, you aren’t even the only person in the picture here.”

“He—” But… but no, that’s a point. Harley’d never asked. It had never occurred to her to ask. It was always just… she didn’t have many options, she assumed the same had to apply to him or he wouldn’t even have gone along with it in the first place, but—

“I don’t mean to upset you,” Pamela says earnestly, leaning forward. “For your sake, at least, I hope this… works out for the best, whatever that means. I just want to know you’re being careful, okay?”

Harley nods slowly. “Yeah,” she replies. “Yeah, I know.” She huffs out a laugh; she can’t pretend that the sick feeling in her chest is from the bruised ribs, but she does her best to try it anyway. “Hey, worst case scenario, it’ll be easier to break it off with him. Right?”

Pamela gives her a soft smile, reaching out and covering the hand on Harley’s knee with her own. Her skin feels delicate and almost waxy, several degrees below normal human temperature when she’s been sitting inside. “Worst case scenario,” she says. “You give me a call and I’ll make sure he regrets whatever he did to deserve it.”

Harley smiles and it almost feels natural. “Thanks, Pam.”

Pam pats her hand. “For my sake, though, try to call me just to talk every once in a while, okay? I don’t think I can have a heart attack these days, but I don’t want to find out.”

A snort. “You got it.”

They still have to talk about Louisiana—and everything that happened before it, and a couple of things that happened after it. But… later.

For now, Harley is just happy that she has her friend back at all.

* * *

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[7.13 PM] closing today?

You  
[7.14 PM] Nah  
[7.14 PM] Just got home though  
[7.15 PM] Why

* * *

Harley is just starting to doze off on her couch in the middle of some random true crime show when there’s a knock at her door.

She is instantly awake and grabbing for the length of metal pipe by the television in an instant. The only people who know where she lives and would actually want to visit her for not-terrible things would either come in through the window or just be unceremoniously waiting on the couch when she got home. Knocking is suspicious. Knocking means bad things.

(It occurs to her that she probably needs better friends.)

She doesn’t squint through the peephole because she shot someone through one once and she no longer trusts them. Instead, she undoes the doorknob lock, and then the deadbolt, and then swings the door suddenly open—

And it’s Nightwing, in costume and also a sling, staring blankly at her improvised weapon. She can almost see the gears turning in that dumb, drugged-up brain of his as he looks at it, then her, then her hand, then…

“I really should have called, huh,” he says, as if the concept that she had a phone that he had talked to her with _quite a lot, actually_ has only just crossed his mind.

“Yeah,” she agrees, propping the pipe up by the doorframe. “You probably should have.”

Nightwing pauses. He looks intensely, unaccountably lost. “Is this a bad time? I can go if this is—I, uh, don’t think I was really thinking.”

Harley feels her expression soften even though she really doesn’t want to. “It’s fine,” she says. “I don’t usually have any other plans than TV, anyway.” She steps away from the door to give him room to come in. “I have a rule against doing anything too freaky with anyone in a sling, though,” she says, “so if you came for that you’re gonna be disappointed.”

He’s limping a little. She tries not to notice. (Did he walk here? Visibly injured and in costume and alone? Is he _trying_ to get himself killed?) “I wasn’t going to ask,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not like I can do much to reciprocate right now, either way. I just wanted to…”

He stares at the couch like he doesn’t know what to do with it. Harley walks up beside him, concerned despite herself. “To…?”

Nightwing shakes his head quickly. “See you?” he tries. “Thank you for helping me back there?”

“You already thanked me,” she reminds him, sitting down on the couch. He follows suit, walking around her so that his injured shoulder is on her far side.

“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it again,” he points out. His free hand finds hers, picks it up and turns it over. Harley freezes in place.

“It was mostly Batman,” she says. Her heart is ratcheting up again, and not in a good way. Not this. Not now. She’s still processing everything, damn it, and she hasn’t slept yet, and…

“But you found him,” Nightwing insists. He looks at her, but she can’t see his eyes through the mask and she can’t handle that right now. “Don’t sell yourself short, Harl.”

She swallows. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he says, blissfully unsuspecting. He’s still holding her hand.

It’s a total non sequitur and she wants to take it back before the words even come out, but she can’t stop herself. “Our… our thing,” she says. “Am I the only one, or…? I mean, not that I’m trying to make it weird over here, just… well, it’s just been you on my side, and…” Yeah, that hole’s probably deep enough to die in now.

Nightwing’s brow furrows a little. “Of course you are,” he says. “I went through sex ed, Harley. I wouldn’t spring that on you without making sure you were okay with it first.” A single, awkward cough, a following wince. “That, and… I probably wouldn’t have time anyway.”

Harley lets out a breath. “Okay,” she says. She feels suddenly, entirely stupid. “Sorry.”

He’s watching her, she thinks. “Why? I mean, it was probably a good idea to ask, but I would have thought it would be earlier if something hadn’t brought it on.” He hesitates. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. I just… rough day, you know?” She rubs her face with her free hand. “I started talking to Pam again—uh, Poison Ivy—and she’s… she’s got a weird way of being supportive.”

He stiffens in a way that would be imperceptible if not for his fingers between hers. “I take it she’s not a fan?” he asks carefully.

“Eh,” Harley says. “She doesn’t like anybody human, but she doesn’t like guys even more. Which isn’t exactly… bad when it comes to me.”

Nightwing nods understandingly. He turns his head and kisses her hair.

(coffee and eggs and sunlight and)

She takes a single, sharp breath. He notices, draws back, untangles their fingers but doesn’t move them away. “Harley?”

Harley shakes her head. (She wants to hide.) “’m fine,” she says. She doesn’t sound fine. “Just a bad day for the, y’know. The craziness.”

“You’re not—” But the sentence dies before he finishes it. He worries his lip. She gets the impression he’s looking at her out of the corner of his eye, but it’s hard to tell. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks gently.

Yes. No? No. (Yes?) “No,” she says. Everything feels heavy.

“Okay,” Nightwing says. He doesn’t move.

Slowly, Harley tips her head onto his shoulder. He doesn’t flinch or make any pained noises, so she figures it probably doesn’t hurt. “So,” she says. “I’m guessing you’re not supposed to be here, huh?”

Nightwing chuckles nervously. “Not even a little,” he says. “I’m just waiting for Batman to show up at the door and drag me home like a kid past curfew.”

She scoffs. “You haven’t had a curfew in your life, Nightwing.”

“I did!” He hesitates. “For about six months, when I was ten. Before I found out Batman was, well. Batman.”

Lived with him out of the mask, then. Pre-Robin. Harley catalogues that information without meaning to, and then wrinkles her nose at herself.

Well, while she’s having all the other uncomfortable conversations in the world, she might as well have this one too. Maybe if she gets everything out of the way all at once, she can sleep a little better. “Speaking of him,” she says. “He wanted to talk to me last night.”

Nightwing takes a breath. “Ah,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure he thinks we’re actually dating, for one thing,” she says. “I told him we weren’t, but I don’t think he believed me.”

He snorts. “Sounds about right. Did he try and give you the ‘break his heart and I’ll break your legs’ speech?”

Harley tries to imagine that. It’s frighteningly easy. “Actually, no,” she says.

“No?” Nightwing turns his head and boggles at her.

“He said,” she says slowly, “that if I wanted to try and figure out your secret identity, he wouldn’t stop me?”

Silence. Not a single muscle in Nightwing’s face moves, but somehow his expression is still completely different. Stunned.

“But,” she’s quick to add, “I won’t—I mean, I don’t even know if I could do it, but I’m not gonna try if you don’t want me to. Like I told him, I don’t need to know.”

He’s looking at her ( _like he can’t quite believe she’s—_ ). “But you want to?” he asks.

Harley raises her head to meet his eyes—or his lenses, at least—properly. She shouldn’t, because she shouldn’t have ever started caring, shouldn’t have started seeing him as anything more than—than—convenient and cute. “Yeah,” she says. It’s too much of an admission to do anything but make her sick.

He sucks in a quiet breath. “You can do it,” he says. “And I won’t mind when you do.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harley does some Investigating™ and then gets bitten by the heroism bug, but only a little.

“Come _on,_ ” Harley says. She’s absolutely whining. She doesn’t care.

“No.” Nightwing leans his head against the back of the couch and smiles opaquely at the ceiling. She hates it.

“You’re worse than your dad,” she says. “Mr. Monosyllables.”

He chokes out a laugh, then immediately winces. “Criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot,” he intones, in a tight-lipped impression that’s… that’s _way_ more good than Harley is comfortable with. “So I will dress as a bad conversationalist to strike fear into their cowardly, superstitious hearts.”

Harley snorts, then hides a giggle in his shoulder before they just start into a never-ending cycle of laughing because the other one is and then he breaks the other half of his ribcage or whatever. (She hasn’t really asked for details. Partly because she honestly doesn’t really wanna know.)

“Really though, Harl. You can figure it out on your own.” Nightwing awkwardly reaches up with the arm she’s leaning on to snag his fingers in her hair. If the angle were better and he weren’t a little hazy with half his movements, it would be really sweet of him. As it is, he’s mostly just covering a third of her face with his hand. “I haven’t exactly been careful around you, after all.” He sounds almost embarrassed.

She doesn’t care. “I can’t even have a _hint?_ ”

“You have enough hints already.” Unforgivably, he’s smiling at her again. She can hear it.

“Hmph,” Harley says into his shoulder. He finds a tangle in her hair. “Watch it,” she mutters.

He puts his hand back down on his lap. Her fingers find it, slot themselves between his, with no particular input or permission from her. “Sorry.”

“Mmhm.” With some effort, she drags her eyelids open. The muted television casts shifting shadows over his face, which at least makes it a little harder to see the fuzzy edge of red-purple bruising along the edge of his mask. Weird, she thinks; she knows all too well the kinds of constant injury that accompany the super-anything life, no matter which side of it you’re on at the time, but she can never remember him actually looking injured unless someone had done it just a couple of minutes before. Really good makeup, she guesses—especially since he’s never gone with Batman’s strategy of just concealing 80% of his face—and it makes sense in a don’t-show-weakness-to-the-people-you’re-trying-to-scare kind of way, but it still feels wrong to _see._

She reconsiders her earlier stance. “How bad is it?” Harley asks, reaching up with her free hand and tracing the bruise’s outline with a fingertip.

Nightwing angles his head to kiss that finger, lightning-quick. Either he wasn’t nearly as doped-up as she thought he was, he can ignore some of the effects when he wants, or she’s just… too tired to see things coming. Or all of those things. “It’s not as bad as it looks, Harl.”

She gives him her most practiced flat look—the one she reserves mostly for people at work who are trying to flirt, but haven’t quite earned a martial arts demonstration just yet. “I shacked up with the Joker for a _long_ time,” she says. Nightwing wrinkles his nose—or he does his best, what with the mask and all. “I know what bullshit sounds like when I hear it.”

“I’ve had worse?” he offers.

“Yeah, you’ve been _shot_ before. Tell me something I don’t know.”

He’s worryingly quiet. His tongue darts out to wet his lips. (There’s a split in the bottom one, ragged with scabbed blood. It’s frankly a miracle it didn’t open when he was laughing earlier.)

Oh, for the love of— “They _shot_ you?”

“No! Well—not much?” Nightwing winces immediately at his own words. “I don’t think they were really trying to. They stopped when—”

Harley is immediately and painfully awake. She straightens up, letting go of his hand and shifting away so she’s not draped over a third of his body. Arms crossed, face dark, she kneels on the other couch cushion and glares at him.

He doesn’t keep talking.

“So you’re tellin’ me,” she says dangerously, “that you went halfway across Gotham City, alone, in that getup, with a messed up shoulder and a _bullet hole_ in you?”

He holds up his free hand in a gesture that would probably be placating if not for the rest of this stupid turn of conversation. “Firstly,” he says, “I wasn’t wearing the costume on the way in. I left my other clothes in the apartment across the hall.”

Harley rolls her eyes. “Yeah, because an injured _civilian_ in the shittier parts of the city is so much safer. And you should definitely be changing your shirt on your own when you’re in a freakin’ sling.”

“And secondly,” he continues, as if she hadn’t spoken at all, “it’s not a _hole._ They just grazed me is all.”

Because, again, that’s _so much better._ Harley can feel a headache coming on behind her eyeballs. “Show me.”

He pulls a face, but obediently pulls the hem of his shirt (which she can _still_ never find when she wants to) up far enough to reveal the edge of a thin gauze pad low on his ribs.

The tape’s starting to peel a little. Harley rolls the costume up farther to see at least _something_ of its extent, her mouth tightening into a thin line when she sees the dark spots in the center of the rectangle.

“Stay there,” she says, getting up off the couch and making her way to the bathroom instead, flicking the light on as she goes. Harley doesn’t really keep much of a first aid kit around anymore, not now that she’s been trying to stay out of trouble ( _ha!_ ), but she’s too much of a pessimist to just leave herself with the kind of “third of a box of expired bandages, some inexplicable eye drops, and an empty bottle of aspirin” deal that her workplace thinks of as adequate. She rifles through her cabinet, pulls out some gauze and tape of her own—thinks for a moment, then wanders into the kitchenette to half-fill a cup with water, just in case he’s still _actively_ bleeding and she has to clean that up.

She knows that wherever Batman spends his downtime is absolutely better equipped to deal with this. Hell, he probably has weird high-tech bandages that fight off infection with nanites. But she—

Well, here she is.

By the time she gets back to the couch, Nightwing hasn’t moved except to roll the shirt up a little more comfortably. He looks up—curiously? Nervously? It’s hard to tell with the _goddamned mask_ in the way—at her when she sits down.

“You don’t have to—” he says, and then cuts himself off when he remembers that it’s probably not going to stop her anyway.

“I know,” Harley says, starting to carefully tease the tape away from his skin without it catching on anything. “I’m just tryin’ to get a blood sample so I don’t have to play detective for as long.”

His chest shakes when he suppresses his laugh, which doesn’t really help her all that much. “You know,” he says, “if you really wanted my DNA, you could have just asked nicely.” Against her better judgement, she snickers. Which he apparently takes as encouragement, which is _exactly_ why she shouldn’t have. “Or just started taking your clothes off at me if you were feeling impatient.”

Harley rolls her eyes. “Maybe later,” she says.

“What about your no-sling rule?” he asks downright sweetly.

She pokes him somewhere there isn’t a bruise, which takes her a second just to locate. “Shut up, Nightwing.”

He chuckles again, but he stops talking. Unfortunately, that means that all he has left to do is just watch her, which is—which is just a tad disconcerting on some level. She likes attention as much as the next person, but he has this way of focusing on her sometimes that’s just…

But anyway, the last of the tape finally gives up the fight. He was honest about it just being a graze, but it’s a deeper graze than she’s comfortable seeing on him. It’s almost definitely going to scar despite how evenly he’s been stitched up, and she knows she couldn’t have done a damn thing to stop it happening and that somehow makes it even _worse._

She’s never been that great at leaving well enough alone.

“Nice stitches,” she says, just to stop her mind going down any of the possible tracks that could ever come out of that. He is still bleeding, but it’s more of an ooze than a trickle; there are a few mostly-dried smudges along the lower edge of the wound, but that’s about it. She dips a spare bit of gauze into the water anyway, starts cleaning it off with tiny, careful strokes.

“Thanks,” he says nonsensically, apparently on instinct. “Alfred did them.”

“The mysterious soup guy,” Harley says.

“I’ll tell him you called him that.” Nightwing exhales slowly as she finishes rubbing the blood from his skin and wads the gauze up with the old bandage. “He’s been with Batman a long time. Had a lot of practice.”

“Yeah,” she answers with something that’s almost a smile. “I can imagine. Now quit talking before you make me miss when I’m putting the tape on.”

He seems to see the wisdom in not moving the wound she’s trying to take care of while she’s in the middle of taking care of it and lets her finish in silence. “Thanks,” he says quietly, the second she’s done.

Harley rolls his shirt back down, kisses her fingertips and touches them to his side, too gently for it to hurt him through the fabric. “Yeah, well,” she says, and doesn’t really have anywhere to go with that. “I’ve been thinking about making a creepy stalker shrine,” is somehow what her mouth decides is the solution to that.

Nightwing bites his lip to keep from laughing and immediately undoing all her work. “You don’t exactly have to stalk me,” he points out, somehow taking this in stride along with every other thing she’s ever said in front of him. “I’m right here.”

“Not all the time,” she says. “I mean, I guess you can spend the night if you want, but I think Batman would kill me for letting you.”

“He wouldn’t _kill_ you,” Nightwing says, with a terrible little grin. “He’d just make you wish he had.”

Harley gives him a look. He snickers, leaning in and kissing her, almost quickly enough that she can’t taste the blood on his mouth.

“I should go, though,” he says against her lips, as if this has only just occurred to him.

“Not alone,” she objects. Every cell in her body rebels against the thought of putting her shoes back on, let alone going anywhere instead of getting into bed and trying to actually sleep before she passes out, but—well, she’s clearly got _some_ kind of feelings going on here, and they won’t let him blissfully waltz into potential danger without her there with him.

“I won’t be,” he promises. He pulls back, reaching up and pressing his fingertip into a little network of seams in his mask. “Batman?” he says, and winces at whatever the response is.

Harley’s mouth twitches. “Tell him it’s not my fault,” she says, getting up off of the couch. “Your stuff’s across the hall?”

Nightwing nods mutely. “He says he knows,” he adds after a moment.

At least there’s that. Harley shakes her head and heads across the room, leaving him to whatever lecture he absolutely deserves to get for this.

Either he was being considerate to whichever one of them had to pick up his change of clothes after he was done _just coming over to see her_ , it didn’t occur to him to lock the empty apartment again, or the lock was just broken in the first place; she doesn’t have to do anything but turn the knob. It’s a perfect mirror image to her own home, just emptier and dustier, with a much bigger spiderweb in the corner. The blinds are closed, but the lights work, and he was reasonable enough to only hide his things in the closet instead of in the ceiling or something similarly stupid and inconvenient.

Of course, the whole damn thing is pretty stupid anyway, especially the whole “lugging a backpack around with a dislocated shoulder” angle. She kind of hates him in a weird, not-actually-hatred-at-all way.

Either Batman’s lectures to his allies are faster than the ones he gives his captured enemies on the way to Arkham, or he’s just saving the rest of it for later, because Nightwing isn’t on the comm anymore when Harley gets back. He gets up when the door clicks shut behind her, reaching out for the bag she’s holding.

“Nuh-uh,” she says, slinging it over her shoulder. “I’m carrying it.”

He hesitates. “I got up the stairs on my own just fine,” he argues halfheartedly.

“Sure,” Harley says. “But you wouldn’t have _had_ to if I’d known you were coming.” She shrugs into the other strap, just to make extra sure that he can’t possibly try to grab it back without a fight. “And you know you could have just shown up in these, right? I’ve seen you without the mask on already. I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t know who you were if you were wearing a t-shirt.”

“You might have hit me with the pipe, though,” he says. She wishes she could see the corners of his eyes crinkling with that smile, but—

“You didn’t know I had one.”

Nightwing ducks his head with a tiny laugh, stepping past her towards the door. “He’ll be here in a couple of minutes,” he says.

“So if you start the stairs now, you might get all the way down before he gets antsy and tries carrying you out?”

“I haven’t been slowed down _that_ much,” he says, sounding equal parts irritated and mildly offended, as they go out into the hallway together.

“Do me a favor and pretend you have been.”

* * *

The Batmobile is already there by the time they get out. Harley still refuses to give Nightwing his stupid backpack, he refuses to let her help him walk over to the passenger’s side, and Batman looks equally disapproving of everything around him. He gives Harley a little nod when she glances at him, though, which she chooses to believe is his version of saying hello. It’s not _un_ friendly, at least.

She leans into the car-slash-stylized-war-machine to put the bag in the backseat. “He just showed up, I swear,” she says to the side of Batman’s cowl when she draws back, since he seems determined to watch Nightwing leaning back against the hood.

“I know,” Batman says dryly.

Harley figures there’s probably nothing else to say on the matter, and she’s trying to get better about listening to that sense when Batman’s involved, so she just sort of nods awkwardly and disentangles herself from the door. She takes a step back onto the sidewalk, and Nightwing’s… just looking at her again. He glances through the windshield as soon as she meets his eyes, pushes off from the Batmobile’s chassis, and she’s expecting a verbal goodbye or at most the third of a hug that he’s currently capable of giving.

He kisses her instead. _Super_ chastely, for obvious and probably (maybe?) glaring reasons, but he lingers just a little bit afterwards. His fingertips play absently with the wispy hair at the back of her neck. She has no idea what to do with her hands, where to put them that won’t aggravate an injury, so she just lets them sit uselessly at her sides.

“Nightwing,” she says.

“Harley,” he answers. He kisses her forehead, then moves away. “See you later.”

Harley clears her throat and tries to feel a little less scattered. Batman’s not looking in her direction, but she is absolutely one hundred percent sure that he saw that because how could he _not_ and she doesn’t know what to do with it. Flirting in front of him is one thing, because she can brush it off as just being a pain in the ass. Being concerned about Nightwing in front of him is only marginally less fine, because, well—she hasn’t wanted either one of them dead in a long time, and just because a lot of her reactions to things are kinda skewed doesn’t mean she doesn’t care at _all_.

But Batman’s… not obviously scowling at them or anything, and he did kind of give her his blessing in the dumbest and most roundabout way he possibly could, so it’s probably fine? Her pulse jerks in something that is absolutely, definitely fear.

The door closes. The Batmobile rumbles down the street, runs a stop sign and takes a right turn far too fast. It’s hard to tell if Batman is a horrible driver or a great one.

Harley folds her arms over her chest, the cold seeping into her socked feet, and goes back inside. On autopilot, she walks back up to her apartment, illegally burns Nightwing’s potential DNA samples on the fire escape, and goes to bed.

* * *

The dream comes again. When he flings himself out of the window, she pushes a mask over her eyes and follows him.

* * *

Unknown  
[2.18 AM] Thank you. -B

You  
[8.34 AM] Uh  
[8.34 AM] Your welcome  
[8.35 AM] Hey is my phone going to explode if your numbers in it

Unknown  
[11.48 AM] It’s an ordinary burner, not what Nightwing gave you. -B

You  
[12.02 PM] Good  
[12.02 PM] Bc this is way easier than getting to the batsignal

Furry Trash  
[12.03 PM] I expect you to treat it as one. -B

You  
[12.04 PM] No cute videos or chain messages or 4 am shower thoughts?

Furry Trash  
[12.04 PM] Absolutely not. -B

You  
[12.05 PM] You ruin all my fun

Furry Trash  
[12.05 PM] Yes. -B

* * *

It takes her a while to even figure out how she wants to try… well… figuring it out. Her first instinct is to actually, genuinely go full stalker shrine, clean out part of her closet and start sticking index cards and bits of yarn to it like a crazy person’s evidence board—but then she starts worrying about people trying to break into her apartment and looking at her notes and figuring out his identity before she does, and she doesn’t really want to risk that. A notebook seems safer, but the only code she knows is just poorly-copied Aurebesh, and that can just get straight-up stolen. So can her phone, and while it’s already kind of insanely dangerous by dint of having two active superheroes, one dormant supervillain, and easily half a dozen other minor ex-Arkham inmates on it… this is different. Ivy’s only real enemies are content to let her go when she’s behaving herself, and if it’s Batman’s burner and something hooked up to Nightwing’s comm, chances are good that tracking them down would just reveal them in their suits. Assuming that they could be traced at all, which they probably couldn’t.

But there’s Nightwing’s little hideout, if he hasn’t cleaned it out yet. And even if he has, there’s no reason she can’t set up shop in it herself.

Harley can only visit it for short spurts in the evenings, and even then not that often; her Gotham metro pass doesn’t stretch quite so far as to let her on the train to Blüdhaven. It’s a hell of a commute just in general, especially when she has to buy a ticket every damn time she takes it.

But the place is secure. The window he took her through faces a flat brick expanse across a narrow street, no easy lines of sight unless you’re looking down that particular street and also _up_ , and if the people who live in Blüdhaven are anything like the people who live in Gotham… most of them won’t. The people who have nothing to worry about don’t want to get involved in anything the bats are hunting; they avoid it because they’re concerned that looking will somehow hook them into the fight too, as bait or as casualties or as obstacles. The people who _do_ have things to worry about don’t look up because they’re worried it’ll make them look more suspicious.

Harley, well… she’s been suspicious from the moment her cover was first blown. And if she’s scared of something bad happening, she’d rather spook it out into the light anyway, get it over with.

(Most of the time. It—it takes her a while, sometimes. But isn’t that why she’s here?)

She doesn’t pull her original outfit on before she comes here. She doesn’t do any of its alternatives, either—extra things to carry in, she’s not planning on doing any crime or any crimefighting, and she definitely doesn’t want to be brightly colored and noticeable when she’s breaking into her—when she’s breaking into Nightwing’s safehouse (whatever he is to her, whatever he might be after she sorts this out) to try and suss out his secret identity.

It feels weird to hide. A little wrong. But… well, it’s kind of necessary at this point, isn’t it?

(She does at least bring a mask with her. It’s nothing special, just a blank black domino mask that she got at a craft store, intending to do some kind of swashbuckler Dread Pirate Roberts-type thing that never formed into anything more than a sketch. But hey, it covers about as much as Nightwing’s does, and clearly that thing works just fine in keeping _his_ identity a secret, so…)

Harley pulls her gloves on, because while Nightwing can probably leave prints wherever he wants without much of anything cropping up, _hers_ will light up a police database like a freakin’ New Year’s celebration. She sets her foot in the first storey’s windowsill, experimentally puts a little weight on it. It holds.

It’s less flashy than climbing down from the roof, but it’s faster when she didn’t start from there in the first place. It’s also slow as hell—her theory about Gotham architecture looks to be holding up pretty well; the buildings there are almost begging to be climbed, but Blüdhaven is all… regular brick and concrete. Not as bad as Metropolis looks to be, with all its smooth walls and glass and steel, but Blüdhaven has only had a superhero using it as his home base for a couple of years. It’s not as old as Gotham, either, and it definitely didn’t come with the same aesthetic already built in. It’s clearly designed for either nothing at all or someone who can fly, not an ordinary—if ludicrously well-trained—human being.

It’s slow, it’s annoying, it’s a little bit painful for the tips of her fingers and toes when she has to make do with ludicrously inadequate grips. But she makes it. She almost isn’t sure if she’s shimmying open the right window at first with how little of a mark Nightwing’s left on the place, but when she steps inside it… it feels right, at least. It doesn’t smell like much of anything—he doesn’t come here often enough for it to smell like _him,_ and _stop it Harley_ —but everything’s about in the right place, and when she pulls the closet door open she triggers the exact same sleeping bag avalanche that she left last time.

“Okay,” she says to no one in particular. “Here goes nothing.”

Pinning things to walls, even here, would leave more than she’s comfortable with. If Nightwing hasn’t left anything lying around in here that’s visible from the freaking windows (with the blinds that are drawn anyway), she can’t really justify anything too dramatic. She has a bright blue notebook with her, a couple of pictures he sent her that she printed out at a library about thirty seconds after it opened (and even then, she still kept close watch on the librarians, just in case they were snooping), a roll of tape to stick the photos to the notebook with, and a pack of sparkly gel pens. Because color-coding sounds useful, but mostly just because she likes sparkly gel pens.

The first time, she’s there for an hour, just writing down everything that she definitely knows for a fact. _Adopted (by Batman? Actual dad?)_ , _Joined the circus sort of (?)_ , _guy named Alfred is his grandfather but isn’t (??)_ . Physical details— _black hair (maybe really really REALLY dark brown?), blue eyes, looks good naked - acrobat? gymnast?_

Harley’s pen hesitates over the page before she can start cataloging his scars. It’s not that—well, it’s just… she knows where some of them came from, she put one or two of them there herself, and—

She skips that part. _No tattoos/birthmarks_ is what she writes instead, with a little frowny face because that just makes things a little harder on her.

Robin. She looks him up on the internet to make sure she’s getting the time about right; the dates are fuzzy as all hell, but she at least gets the right year. Sixteen years ago, and she doesn’t know how old he is but it can’t be too far off from her own age, so… god, he was just a kid. Thirteen at the most, but he looks younger than that in the first blurry picture anyone had ever gotten of him. _8-13?_ she guesses, which is a way bigger span than she personally likes, but it’s all she’s got.

But that’s… that’s weird, right? Batman likes to pretend that he’s just as heartless as half the people he hunts, but you run into him often enough and you start noticing where his emotional chinks are. He doesn’t like innocents being hurt, yeah, whatever, stick him with the rest of the Justice League on that front; that’s easy. But—but it’s the kids that really get to him. He comes for them first, rescues them first, and that’s reasonable enough but she’s heard of him staying with them sometimes even after they’re safe just to make sure they’re _okay_ , checking up on them after everything’s said and done…

So if children were that much of a soft spot for him that even Harley knows about it, why the hell did he start up the Robin thing at all?

It doesn’t sit right, and she feels like she might be onto something there, but… probably not something enough, exactly.

Still. Something.

* * *

You  
[9.38 PM] So whyd you become robin anyway

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.39 PM] no hints, Harl. we talked about this

You  
[9.41 PM] Maybe im just curious did you ever think about that >:c

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.42 PM] you’ve never been curious about it before, so…

You  
[9.43 PM] I hate you so much

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[9.43 PM] sure you do. ♥

* * *

The second time, she stares at the pictures for a while. The picture of his neighbor’s kitten ends up getting a special level of attention, because while a couple of square feet of carpet isn’t much to go off of, it’s definitely the carpet in the building where he actually lives… but there’s no way in hell she’s going to start digging around apartment advertisements trying to find that exact pattern in the pictures. Not on the first week, anyway.

His pictures from inside the costume, then. Mostly weird perspectives that she probably couldn’t get to without a grappling hook, but she can see a couple of landmarks repeated, at least. If she can figure out where all of them came from, she can maybe get a feel for where his base of operations is.

Maybe.

Regardless of everything else, she’s always done better thinking when she’s outside and walking around than inside with… well, with just her thoughts.

Harley swings out of the window and clambers her way onto the roof.

* * *

It would be easy not to notice it if she were anyone else. It looks like a hell of a lot of people are doing exactly that—or they are noticing it and it’s just that they don’t care, or they do care but they don’t want to get involved, or they assume that everything’s going to work out okay if they just keep walking.

But Harley is herself, so she notices.

It’s not anything dramatic. It’s just a random person walking down the street; Harley only spots her in the first place because her hair is the kind of gradient teal-to-navy deal that must have been absolutely hellish to get right. Except when she rounds the corner of the block, she just… freezes, dead still, like someone hit the pause button on her entire body. There’s this single, paralyzed second where nothing happens, a smattering of chatting pedestrians parting to go around her, and then she turns on her heel and starts power walking in the direction she came.

Harley doesn’t see what she does, but it can’t have been good. She scans the sidewalk, a little frown etched between her eyebrows. She’s expecting—well, with _that_ reaction, she’s expecting something well-dressed and garish, but she just sees regular humans in regular clothes with regular facial expressions. Nobody here even looks like the normal, run of the mill kind of creep she has to fight the urge to dropkick through the wall when they mess with the new girls. (And, sometimes, the new boy. She’s not sure if it was Nightwing’s influence or just happenstance, but Superbabes is branching out. Harley’s kind of proud in a weird, still-wishes- _she_ -wasn’t-working-there-herself way.)

But there is this one person, some tall brunette chick in a purple t-shirt, whose steps get noticeably faster as she rounds the corner. She calls out something down the sidewalk and Blue Hair flinches and starts running and Harley is outpacing her along the rooftops before she can think better of it.

(Maybe this is totally normal. Maybe this is a misunderstanding. Maybe Blue Hair and Purple Shirt just had a really awkward breakup and Blue doesn’t want to talk about it even if she probably should. But _maybe_ it’s something worse, and _maybe_ Harley can at least try to help, even if she couldn’t sort her own shit out until after she barely insanity-pleaded her way out of multiple murder charges.)

Blue is still trying to act like she’s just walking and hasn’t seen or heard anything, so it’s almost ridiculously easy for Harley to get ahead of her. These buildings aren’t as tall as the ones she’s used to running around in Gotham; she can’t scale a Blüdhaven skyscraper without one of the bats’ gadgets, anyway. Getting down without losing track of Blue isn’t hard.

Balcony two storeys down—nearly topples a potted plant, but manages to catch it before she vaults over the rickety banister. Her feet land on the canvas awning of a storefront a few feet below; she rolls so as not to punch straight through it, somersaulting off the edge and landing on her feet a couple of steps in front of Blue. (Her high school gymnastics coach would be _so_ proud of her. She fights the urge to bow.)

There aren’t too many people on the sidewalk right now in that awkward period between the morning commute and the lunch-related exodus, but the ones that are there do a nervous little scattering dance, taking a couple of steps in whatever direction “away” is and then mostly ducking their heads and pretending there’s nothing to see here. They don’t know Harley; all they see is _another_ person running around in a mask, even if it’s a mask coupled with something that’s almost civvies at this point. She hasn’t shot up the place or made threats yet, but she also hasn’t done anything particularly heroic. In the absence of either data point, it’s easier to just act like everything’s normal and they didn’t spot her at all.

Kinda funny, really.

Except for the fact that Blue was already spooked, so Harley’s sudden appearance does absolutely nothing to reassure her. She doesn’t _scream_ , which makes this a better first impression than it would have been if Harley had been wearing any kind of recognizable getup, but she does give a sharp gasp that honestly comes out as an _eep_ and then stops short again like she’s not sure what to do with her legs.

Harley winces. Okay, maybe her entrance could use some work. A little bit. Hell, it’s not like she’s ever had to show up out of nowhere in a way that _wasn’t_ meant to scare the crap out of someone; she has no practice with this.

“Hey,” she says. “Think you’re being followed.” Oh, great, Harley. That’s just great.

Blue swallows. Her head twitches, like she’s just heard a sound over her shoulder but she knows that if she looks it’ll turn out to be a ten-foot firebreathing monster made of razorblades and she’ll only be safe if she doesn’t see it, or she’s a cartoon character who’s just self-aware enough to know she’ll only start falling when she looks down and realizes the ground isn’t there anymore. “I noticed,” she says, and starts walking again. Harley can actually see her hands shaking as she brushes past.

She falls into step behind Blue and a little to the side, easily keeping pace with her uneven, trying-not-to-run stride. “Look,” she says, half under her breath. “I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t wanna get arrested again, so I’m not gonna punch anyone out today. But if you just need to lose her, I can help you out, okay?”

Blue huffs out a hysterical almost-titter. There’s a bubble around both of them now, a handful of rubberneckers coming out to see if Harley’s new or if she’s someone they can recognize, the normal pedestrians still patiently pretending that neither one of them exists. “And I can trust you not to drag me into an alleyway and murder me because…?”

“’Cause us mask types, it’s not our style,” Harley shoots back. “The good ones aren’t gonna kill you at all, and the bad ones are gonna bring out the themed goons and active volcanoes. We’re too classy to just stab somebody to death and leave them in a dumpster, you know?”

The titter happens again, but louder. “Reassuring,” Blue says, tight, like her throat is the wrong shape for speech somehow.

Harley bites her lip and tries a different tack. “One of my exes? Guy had a whole team of shrinks lookin’ at him and they ended up callin’ him a psychopath. You can’t even _diagnose_ someone with that. He was just that much of an asshole.”

Blue looks at her and says nothing.

“You can tell me to mind my own business and I will,” Harley mostly doesn’t lie, “but I gotta ask, you know? Just in case.”

They travel a quarter of a block in absolute silence. And then Blue takes a single, shaky breath. “Okay,” she says. “But that’s my sister, not my ex.” A flock of sixty- or seventy-somethings meander their way out of a revolving door and clog up the sidewalk behind them; if they’re going to try a vanishing act, now’s a good time.

Harley shrugs. “Hey, family can be creeps too. Now follow me into this dark alley.”

Blue falters, staring at her with a startled _are you shitting me_ look, but she lets Harley take her by the elbow and tug her a few steps down the side street.

“One sec,” Harley says. “Trust me, this’ll be good.”

“Uh-huh,” Blue answers, crowding herself a little closer to the wall. Brick, new-ish, not great to get a hold of, but Harley doesn’t need to _climb_ it. She’d scoped the area a little before she got too deep into her snooping—didn’t want to have to make a trek halfway across the city to find her starting point again if she ended up back on the ground in a way she wasn’t expecting. If there is one thing that Blüdhaven architecture has in common with Gotham, it’s the love affair with big old fire escapes everywhere they can get away with them.

(Which isn’t really surprising, since Harley’s pretty sure that there are safety codes involved with those. But then, she’s not exactly used to safety codes getting _followed_ , so it’s still a little weird.)

She takes a step back, gives herself as much of a running start as she can possibly get with the limited space, and launches herself towards the wall—and then off of it, scrabbling to the side, getting just barely enough momentum and height that she can get her hands on the bottom side of the railing and pull herself up.

Blue makes a tiny, impressed noise, then nervously looks behind them. It’s still just the mix of old people and people pretending that the alley doesn’t exist, simply because there’s someone in a mask inside of it, but they don’t have much time beyond that. Harley makes quick work of the latches holding the latter in place, sliding it down so that Blue can follow.

“I was expecting a little more running,” Blue says cautiously, but she’s already got her hands on the rungs.

“Trust me, honey,” Harley says, holding a hand out to help pull her the last couple of feet up and then yanking the ladder back up behind them. “If you ain’t in Metropolis, nobody ever thinks to look _up_.”

They’re just barely in time. Blue ducks behind Harley the second it becomes an option, Harley huddles into her coat to make herself as small as possible. A few breaths later, Purple Shirt finally breaks through the sea of seniors—sea-niors? Nah, that’s stupid—and looks around. Her head swivels down the alley. She hesitates, then turns to start jogging down it, looking behind dumpsters.

“Samantha?” she says. “Look, this is _ridiculous_ , Mom and I just want to talk—”

Blue—Samantha, or maybe not exactly, judging by how she twitches at the name—doesn’t breathe. Neither does Harley, not until Purple Shirt makes a tiny, disgusted noise and keeps walking until she exits the other side of the alley without ever glancing towards their hiding place.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Blue says with a laugh that sounds like she’s going to burst into tears at any moment.

Harley grins, leaning back against the brick wall like her own heart isn’t racing a little bit too. (What the everliving hell does she think she’s doing?) “Told ya,” she answers.

Blue huffs out another breathless little chuckle, raising her hand to her face and covering her eyes. She’s still shaking. “It’s Sam, by the way,” she says. “I hate being called Samantha.”

Harley nods understandingly. “If everyone who calls you that is as much of an uptight creep as that one, I can’t blame you.”

“Mom’s worse,” Sam volunteers. “But anyway, just… thanks.” She—(? Harley’s not gonna start randomly questioning, that’d be rude, but)—they drop their hands to their lap and stare at their fingers for a few seconds. “Whoever you are, anyway.”

Harley hedges. She—well, she highly doubts that _Harley_ is what Sam’s looking for in an answer (super-whatevers have been around for long enough that an entire etiquette has sprung up in their wake; you don’t ask the real names of the people who just saved your ass, you just _don’t_ ), and _Harley Quinn_ carries… a lot of weight with it. Sam wouldn’t be nearly so friendly after hearing that name—and she’s pretty sure, on some level, it’s not even accurate anymore anyway.

Harley could salvage the moniker if she wanted to, twist it into something all her own. But she doesn’t want to. This time last year, she’d swear on her life that she didn’t want anything to do with costumes or capes or masks at all, on any conceivable side of the spectrum, but… Harley’s delusional, but even she has a limit to how many lies she can tell herself before she stops believing them. Sleeping with Nightwing for months, tripping and falling headfirst into wanting worse, putting on a mask to protect _him_ more than herself, and now she’s just stumbled into helping some total rando lose her maybe-stalker for a little bit—

It means something. There’s too much there not to mean something, even if it’s something that Harley doesn’t want to know.

She takes a breath. “Still figuring that one out,” she says finally. “All the good names are taken, you know?”

Sam chuckles. “I can imagine,” they say.

They both lapse into silence for a few more seconds. It’s safe to leave now. Harley probably _should_ leave; she has shit to do. But she stays. “You gonna be okay?” she asks finally.

Sam worries their lip, then nods. “My family doesn’t know where I live,” they say slowly. “Just came back in town for a friend’s wedding, heading back out tomorrow.”

It’s not ideal, but Harley doesn’t really bother looking for those anyway. “Good,” she says.

* * *

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.38 PM] new costume?

You  
[6.39 PM] ?????  
[6.39 PM] How  
[6.40 PM] I was on the sidewalk for 2 MNITUES

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.40 PM] full city surveillance obviously  
[6.40 PM] or I just know where to look for new people in masks showing up in Blüdhaven

You  
[6.41 PM] Reddit?

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.41 PM] pretty much  
[6.42 PM] anyway, thanks

You  
[6.42 PM] For?

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.43 PM] every time someone new shows up, a lot of the worse criminals drop off the radar for a little bit  
[6.44 PM] try to figure out how worried they need to be

You  
[6.44 PM] I wasnt looking for them though  
[6.44 PM] I was just there

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.45 PM] I know that. they don’t  
[6.45 PM] not that I’m asking you to do my job while I’m out of commission or anything

You  
[6.46 PM] You’re welcome for accidentally helping

Battery Supplier ♥ (ICE)  
[6.47 PM] yeah, that ♥

You  
[6.49 PM] ♥

* * *

Furry Trash  
[10.58 PM] Be careful. -B

You  
[11.00 PM] ??????????  
[11.01 PM] Of what  
[11.01 PM] Bears  
[11.02 PM] Sharks  
[11.02 PM] Bearsharks  
[11.02 PM] Your just tring to scare me arent you???????

Furry Trash  
[11.10 PM] You’re* -B

You  
[11.11 PM] _Attachment: fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou.gif_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so do y'all like how I've been on the second to last chapter for the past three updates now
> 
> sigh. XD
> 
> also SHOUT-OUT to LordVitya/protodan for being the rad-tastical beta reader he always is
> 
> and SHOUT-OUT to my brother for his suggestion for Small Thing A New Superhero Could Do That Hasn't Been Done To Death Already, Please No More Random Muggings
> 
> and inexplicably also a SHOUT-OUT to the Star Wars Writing Alliance Discord server for helping me crank this out way faster than normal
> 
> and most importantly SHOUT-OUT to all of you for being absolutely freakin' delightful and way more encouraging and lovely and talkative than I ever could have expected for this long-winded bit of silliness. Bless you guys. <3
> 
> (fun fact about Sam: I was originally gonna have them be a lesbian just bc I like having little details like that planned for random OCs even if it'll never come up, and then they ended up here. they're something. genderqueer? maybe! transguy? entirely possible! still figuring things out? also very probable! IT'S A CHOOSE YOUR OWN GENDER ADVENTURE EVERYBODY)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harley brushes off her sewing machine, Poison Ivy shows up again, and plant-based truth serum (truth pollen?) is utilized in place of a therapist.
> 
> Also, a motorcycle occurs.

Harley’s almost there. She doesn’t know what “there” is, but she’s close to _something_ , she just… she knows it.

She stops slinking around quite as much when she’s over there in semi-costume. There’s not much that she does that’s particularly heroic, mostly because there’s just very little to be done for someone who has no idea how vigilante justice works on a day-to-day level, but she does what she can. Keeps it light, doesn’t hurt anyone, makes sure that if she absolutely _has_ to intervene on some kind of physical level, somebody else throws the first punch. But that really only happens once, and the guy is _super_ drunk.

(Nightwing was right; the danger of Blüdhaven has a tendency to show up in three-piece suits, not spandex-and-mask ones. Kind of sucks that she only knows what to do with the second sort.)

She assumes Batman likes whatever the hell it is that she’s doing, because he doesn’t say he disapproves and he has a tendency to make that sort of thing ferociously known. She knows that Nightwing likes whatever she’s doing because he thanks her again every time she shows up and does anything, even if it’s just casually sitting around on rooftops people-watching.

Harley tells him that she doesn’t have anything better to do. He says she’s only saying that because he’s injured and grounded. It’s not _wrong_ , but she giggles anyway, and there’s no guilt or lingering weirdness in it. She feels… a little better, at least. Not all the way, but getting there.

Pam… Pam still doesn’t know anything more than what Harley told her in the coffee shop. Or if she does, if she’s paying attention to wherever Nightwing goes to keep track of new obscured faces in his town, she doesn’t say anything. Harley can’t even begin to know how to broach the subject with her.

_Hey, remember how I teamed up with our old worst enemies? I’m doing basically the same thing now, but on my own, and not because I think the world’s going to be turned into asparagus but just because I feel like it I guess! Cool, right?_

No.

Harley never said she wasn’t a coward when it came to the actually important stuff.

* * *

After the third masked visit to Blüdhaven, a box shows up on the outside of her windowsill. Can’t be from Nightwing because he’d probably have delivered it in person; can’t be from any normal postal service because they would have left it in, you know, any of the reasonable places that reasonable people can expect mail to show up in. Unmarked cardboard boxes aren’t Joker’s style, but she checks to make sure he’s still in Arkham before she even looks at it too hard, and she gingerly takes it to the apartment across the hall before even trying to open it, and she darts to the other side of the room the second she’s done cutting the tape.

It doesn’t blow up or start laughing or gassing her or shooting her, so she dares to go and push the top flap open. It’s about 80% full of shredded newspaper, which is at least easier to dispose of than packing peanuts are, so that’s nice. The other 20% is something… metal, which is weird, because the box didn’t feel like it had anything much heavier than a paperback inside it.

Cautiously, Harley pulls the newspaper off to the sides. A little jolt of adrenaline slams into the inside of her skin when she sees something suspiciously gun-shaped, but—no, it’s not… she’s seen some weird guns in her time, but none shaped quite like that. It’s blocky, the barrel thick and rectangular, two triggers instead of just one.

She picks it up. There’s a nest of points in the muzzle instead of a hole, a set of claws tucked into itself.

(She knows what this is.)

Harley turns the grapnel over in her hands, searching for the telltale symbol etched into the grip, or the barrel, or both, but there’s nothing. Just a suspiciously flat, blank expanse of black metal on the side of the handle, in the one place that isn’t covered in important-looking maybe-spinny doohickeys. So… yeah, that’s definitely where the Bat symbol _should_ be, and it isn’t.

So… Batman sends her the exact thing she’s been internally complaining about not having ever since she started accidentally chasing him and his around in her spare time, with a suspicious lack of any kind of branding on it, and absolutely no explanation. She digs around in the box some more, but there’s just…

There’s just a little pack of enamel paint pens, and that’s it. No note or anything. Because that’s too easy.

* * *

You  
[5.38 PM] So  
[5.38 PM] Thanks  
[5.38 PM] Also what

Furry Trash  
[12.14 AM] Consider it a safety net. -B

You  
[8.20 AM] Aww  
[8.20 AM] Worried about lil old me?

Furry Trash  
[8.25 AM] Nightwing does. -B

* * *

She spends two hours doing nothing but playing with the thing, swinging back and forth around Gotham, laughing to the clouds as the line rockets her up so much faster than she could possibly climb. She figures out how to loosen the hooks remotely (that’s what the second trigger is for, it turns out, and she’s really glad she tried it _before_ she was dangling three storeys above concrete and not after) and all she wants to do at that point is to just launch herself into the sky at the apex, but—

But Nightwing worries. So she saves her experimentation for whenever she has a plan B lined up if she misses her target when she starts falling back down.

* * *

The sketchbook comes back out. It’s not for another Harley variation.

Red and black is the norm for her, but she’s been trying to break out of her norms, right? Red and yellow? Orange? White?

She designed her original costume herself (and made it, because the Joker was no help, as usual), but she’d had a baseline for it. She doesn’t know how to start from scratch. Whatever bats as a concept actually mean to Batman, she has no equivalent for it. She doesn’t have a crest from her dead homeworld or a set of armor from the hidden magical island where she comes from. There’s nothing about where she was born or where she grew up that she can turn into anything. Before the Joker, there was just a long string of textbooks followed by a short burst of labcoats. There’s just… nothing that she can look at and know that it’s _hers_.

Freehanding it just nets her a lot of chevron-related designs in easy blocks of color. And… fuck’s sake, she didn’t come this far (whatever “this far” even means) to be another goddamned sidekick, even if this guy isn’t a complete sack of crap. And none of this is _usable_ , and she hates the sight of a pencil and she’s still got that itch in the back of her head that’s telling her she’s missing something stupid obvious and she should really be working on that instead. She’s in Nightwing’s hideout, for crying out loud. The only reason she’s here at all is to figure out who he is, and she’s just… sitting on his floor with some colored pencils instead.

Harley makes a noise of absolute despair and chucks the sketchpad across the room before slumping back onto the floor, slinging an arm over her face.

And then the door opens.

“Hey,” says Nightwing’s voice. “Thought I might find you here.”

Harley lurches up to her feet, feeling somehow like she’s been caught out, but… well, if he was gonna be weird about her knowing where this place was, then he would have abandoned it after she spent the night. “Uh?” she says. She has the sudden urge to hide her little stalker notebook, even though… you know… he already knows about it. Sort of. He at least knows that she’s trying to sort out who he is, which has to mean he’s at least expecting _something_ weird and stalker-looking to be going on.

She means to say something—something normal, like “hi” or whatever, but he’s… he’s in his civvies. Of course he’s in his civvies, the sling is gone but he’s probably still recovering, so it’s not like he could do the normal window thing, but the point is—the point is that he’s wearing a normal shirt and a normal pair of cargo pants, and she can see his face, and it’s the daytime.

What happens when she opens her mouth is, “If you wanted to meet up, you could’ve… y’know, called.”

Nightwing runs his fingers through his hair, ruffling it nervously. “I didn’t,” he says. “I mean, I’m happy to see you, but I came here just to look around. You’ve been the only one setting off the cameras here, but Batman taught me paranoia pretty early.”

Her ears latch onto the only part of that that sounds important. “Cameras?”

He pauses, and then a slow wince passes over his face, a visual _oh,_ **_damn_ ** _it_ that probably wouldn’t be a cute look on anyone else. “Cameras,” he says, somehow making the single word sound like an apology. “Motion-sensitive. I… figured you’d know.”

Yeah… yeah, she probably should have. Or it probably should have at least occurred to her a little. “I was kinda distracted the first time I was here,” Harley points out.

“None in the, uh. None in the shower, I promise,” he instantly answers. He looks almost taken aback at the implication of the question she didn’t ask. “I wouldn’t have come in otherwise. Or let you go in without letting you know, at least, but _especially_ not…”

Harley bites the inside of her cheek. “That’s a shame,” she says, and she’s treated to the sight of Nightwing’s blush, full and unhindered. “Would have loved to see that again.”

He coughs, shakes his head with a brief and startled smile. “Me too,” he says.

A small, fiercely irrational part of her is insisting that she needs to stay right where she is or he’ll pop out of existence. Or his mask will pop into existence. One of those. But— _but_ , they haven’t seen each other since he showed up at her apartment and tried to bleed on her sofa, and she was almost scared to touch him for fear of hurting him then. He can’t be at 100% yet—nobody human heals that fast, no matter how stubborn he is—but he looks… more comfortable. He’s not holding himself as carefully still as he was before.

Nothing’s changed. (Except that she’s thinking about moonlighting again, and she’s got a half-dozen sketches that she’s scribbled over because they just hadn’t looked right, and she’s been paying attention to people who might need help, and she’s pretty sure that she—)

Harley closes the distance. She grazes her hands over his waist, not quite hugging him just in case his ribs have come to some terrible secondary fate that he didn’t tell her about, and she tucks her forehead against his shoulder.

Nightwing turns his head to kiss her temple, one of his arms looping around her shoulders while the other one—the one that was in a sling the last time she saw him—presses into her hip, his hand splayed across the small of her back. “Missed you too, Harl,” he says.

She feels like she ought to be irritated at the presumption (?) of it, but that was last week… month… year? It’s hard to tell if it’s just that she’s mellowed out a little about what emotions she does have, her reactions to them, or if she’s spontaneously begun developing new ones of late. All she knows is that his voice is warm and his words unwind something soft and alien inside her chest.

Harley pulls back with just her upper body, just enough so she can look at him and drink in the sight of him. She wants to pull him closer to the window so she can see what his eyes look like in the sunlight, but she doesn’t. “Feeling better?” she asks.

Nightwing nods. His thumb tracks a slow pattern over her shoulder, almost distracted—not like he’s trying to soothe her, more like he just wants to touch her. “I probably shouldn’t push it,” he says ruefully, “but as far as I can tell, there’s been less going on lately than there should have been. I hear there’s a new vigilante in town I have to thank for helping out while I’ve been gone.” He grins at her. Without the mask on, in _much_ better light than the last time she saw it, it’s absolutely devastating. “I don’t suppose you’d know who she is, would you? I’ve been meaning to thank her properly.” His eyes flicker to her mouth a second before he kisses it, unfairly slow and sweet.

She’s behaving. She’s _behaving_ . Batman knows where she lives. “She ever figures out a name for herself, you’ll be the first to know,” Harley says, keeping her hands very firmly where they are and _not_ pushing him up against the door and proving to herself that he’s real and solid and okay in the ways that she wants to.

His eyelids crinkle in confusion, his eyebrow quirking a touch upwards. “I thought you were pretty happy with the one you already had,” he says.

Harley makes a face, because this is a road she can’t even adequately explain to herself half the time. “Yeah, I just…” She shrugs helplessly. “Felt like I wanted somethin’ new, y’know? Something that wasn’t from you-know-who.”

Nightwing’s face clears. “Makes sense,” he says. “I did the same thing, and ‘Robin’ was my idea anyway.” He does something with his face that’s half amusement and half wince. “And Batman’s no Joker. I imagine the association is, uh. Worse. With you.”

She snorts. “Just a little,” she agrees good-naturedly. And—actually, this is perfect. “Hey,” Harley says. “How’d you come up with Nightwing, anyway? _Not_ because I’m trying to figure out who you are, I promise.”

Nightwing smirks. “Sure it isn’t,” he says, his other hand dropping to her waist. He wets his lips. “It was because of Superman, actually,” he says.

Harley wrinkles her nose on pure, nervous reflex. Historically, superheroes don’t get along with people like her—partly because people like her don’t have a tendency to actually move on from their villain-ing for very long before falling off the wagon. She can deal with the bats because she knows they’re just as human as she is underneath all of the theatrics and the dark colors, but once flying starts entering into the equation is about where she draws a hard line. (Part of why she never left Gotham, if she’s honest. Batman doesn’t seem to like anyone outside of his little squadron snooping around either.) “If you’re saying I track him down and ask for advice…”

“I’m not, but he’d probably give it to you,” Nightwing says.

“I don’t think hanging out with a laser-shooting alien is a good idea for an ex-con,” she retorts, giving her the most skeptical look she possibly can. It’s a pretty good one.

He grins. “He’s just as much of a softie as Batman is, just without trying to pretend he isn’t. Trust me.”

She makes a doubtful noise, but doesn’t question it. “So,” she says. “How’d you manage to get an actually _interesting_ name out of the guy who just goes by ‘Superman’ all the time?”

Nightwing snorts. “Nightwing was a legend on his homeworld,” he said. “Sort of a superhero to Kryptonians, the way he told it. A myth at first, though. It got a little confusing after that.” He worries the inside of his cheek with his teeth. “He had a partner,” he says. It sounds casual, which is exactly why she doesn’t think that it actually is.

She shouldn’t ask. This is weird, this is exactly the kind of thing that she’s trying to avoid, but she doesn’t have any other ideas… and if ‘Nightwing’ didn’t even come from _Nightwing_ , it’s not so bad, right? She’s just getting it from Superman once removed. “They have a cool name too?”

“She was Flamebird,” he says. “I always thought it was cool, anyway.”

Okay, yeah. Harley’s not exactly a connoisseur on super _hero_ names, but it definitely _sounds_ good. “Tell me about her?”

* * *

He does. He doesn’t make anything of it, or act like he could give a damn whether she adopts it or not; he’s just a guy telling her a story. Even if it’s a long story that he admits, several times, he didn’t quite get all of, partly because even Superman was getting it second-hand from a glorified space encyclopedia. But it’s… it’s nice. The stories are nice, and the sound of his voice is nice, and he disentangles himself so they can both sit on the floor instead but he keeps holding her hand and that’s nice too.

And it is a really cool name.

She doesn’t make any decisions then. She’s really firm about that. Enough of her life at this point has been snap decisions borne from a guy she’s into just talking to her for a bit, and the fact that this particular guy isn’t trying to talk her _into_ anything doesn’t mean that she should just throw that knowledge out the window and let the lack of pressuring work exactly the same way as its presence.

By the time he _stops_ talking, it’s a little closer to afternoon than it was before. He’s sitting with his back to the door, his legs stretched out straight in front of him, his ankles crossed. The sun’s in a single magical sliver just above the roof of the next building over, illuminating him in soft gold. He’s quiet now, his eyes hooded a little against the sunlight. His eyelashes are strangely fascinating.

Harley stops behaving. “Hey,” she says. “Where are the cameras pointed again?”

Nightwing turns his head to glance at her. The tendon in his neck tenses, casts a sharp shadow over his throat. “One at the door, one at the window,” he says. “Why?”

Well, isn’t that convenient. “Just curious,” she says, pushing off of the wall, slinging a leg over him and turning so they’re face to face. Harley doesn’t sit down, doesn’t put any weight on him, just in case; she never got an exact catalog of his injuries, doesn’t know if he’s managed to pick up any more when she wasn’t paying attention.

Nightwing’s hands settle on her waist. “Sort of a non sequitur,” he says, smiling up at her.

“Not really,” Harley says, pulling her jacket off and slinging it to the side. She sees his eyes widen a tick as she hooks her fingers under the hem of her shirt, and she almost regrets how slowly she peels out of it because it means that’s all she can get out of his expression.

“Uh,” he says. “Harley?”

“What?” she asks cheerfully, pulling her arm out of the last sleeve and starting to tug her hair out of its pigtails. “It’s just you, right?”

He nods mutely as she combs her fingers through her hair, tries to get the damn stuff to stop trying to lump itself on either side of her head. “Just wanted to… check?” he says.

“On?” Harley grins at him, reaching behind herself and unhooking her bra. There’s something to be said for teasing him, sure, but there’s also something to be said for overwhelming him as much as possible.

He tears his eyes away to meet hers for just long enough to give her an unimpressed look. “If you wanted me to think clearly, you’ve got a strange way of showing it, Harl.” His thumbs brush her skin just above the waistband of her pants, not wavering or wandering.

“Yeah, well,” she says, shrugging out of the straps and discarding the last vestiges of clothing on the top half of her body. Nightwing’s gaze immediately redirects. “You want me to stop?”

“ _Hell_ no,” he says, and stretches up to kiss her. His fingertips dip into the back pockets of her jeans, his hands easing her down until she settles on his lap properly. His breath hitches against her mouth when she rolls against him in a gentle drag, still careful even with his apparent encouragement not to be.

Harley’s seen him naked more times than she cares to count. That part isn’t new anymore, so she doesn’t try to chase it. What catches her interest now is the distracted way his eyes flick over her when the kiss breaks, how his brow smooths out as his initial confusion switches gears into normal interest. His eyes aren’t all blue; there’s a starburst of grey streaking out from the pupil, a handful of tiny asymmetrical flecks of green. The colors meld and flatten out in a ring of startlingly dark blue-grey—deep ocean, she thinks, almost black but not quite. She’s pretty sure she could just look at him for hours if she had the chance.

(She’s pretty sure she could love him a lot if she let herself. And not just because he’s nice to stare at, because he’s… because of all of him.)

Harley lets her mouth wander, trailing down from his lips to his jaw. He needs to—he needs to _not_ shave, she corrects herself firmly before the thought can finish forming, because his stubble scratches at her lips in exactly the best way (and she could wake up to it, maybe, if she learned his name and they let each other stay). She frames his face with her hands, encourages him to tilt his head back with her thumbs pressed just below his chin, and it shouldn’t be strange to her that he does it without even a moment’s hesitation.

(Sure, if she shifted her grip and tightened it, he could probably fight her off in his sleep. She had normal self-defense classes and a lot of street experience; he was trained by a frickin’ ninja since _puberty_. But the fact that he doesn’t tense up at all, doesn’t pause—the fact that her attacking him doesn’t even seem to occur to him even as a possibility anymore, even though it was the whole of their working relationship until she hung up the bad guy schtick for good—)

He swallows. His Adam’s apple bobs under her tongue. He’s not fidgeting or anything, but she can feel his body tensed up a little between her thighs.

Harley catches his skin between her teeth, bites a mark on the side of his neck, nudges her lips against it afterwards as though kissing it better. It’s hard to tell which of those actions he likes the most, or if it’s the whole combination that’s doing it for him; either way, his fingers tighten on her, and when he breathes her name she can feel his voice on her tongue.

This is what she wants. She knows that, can articulate it, can take it out of the box it wouldn’t fit in and look at it and accept it for what it is. This isn’t actually any different from any of the other times they’ve hooked up, except for the fact that it is totally different. She’s not just coming back after getting spooked and stumbling along into a new dynamic; she’s trying to dig him up, she’s trying to insert herself into _both_ of his lives instead of just being a feature in half of one. And she feels, finally, like she’s okay with that development. Something’s quickening her pulse besides lust, but if it is fear, it’s the good kind.

Harley straightens up. Nightwing’s eyes are hazy and eerily focused all at once, watching her face. He smiles when she catches his gaze. “Comfortable?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “You?”

“So far,” he answers. He leans forward, his hands moving to the button of her jeans, thumbing it open.

Harley puts her hand over his before he can get much farther than that, pulling it up to her lips and kissing his fingers. “Hold your horses, Nightwing,” she says. “I’m trying to return a favor here.”

Nightwing blinks, momentarily distracted by her mouth. “What favor?”

She shuffles back, somewhat regretfully leaving her perch in favor of letting him move. “Lie down,” she instructs. “Or stand up, I guess. I don’t care, I just wanna watch you.”

He swallows again, but pushes himself unsteadily to his feet. “If you’re going for _exact_ repayment of what I think you’re doing, shouldn’t we—”

Harley doesn’t let go of his hand and doesn’t budge. “Probably,” she agrees, flattening her hand over his stomach and pushing him back against the wall. “Pretty dark in there, though.”

He shivers when she ghosts her palm over his crotch, leaning heavily against the door as if it was his idea all along. “Right,” he says. “You know, the mask doesn’t cover that much. Didn’t think it’d be this important to you after you’d seen it off once or twice.”

She scoots forward on her knees, undoing the button on his cargo pants and pulling the zipper down without ceremony. “There’s seeing you with it off,” she says, pulling the waistband down. “And then there’s actually being able to _see_ when I’m seeing you with it off.” The whole mess of canvas and pockets and buttons obligingly crumples the rest of the way down to the floor. Underneath, he’s just wearing regular boxer briefs—attractively tight, but not the compression shorts she’s used to dealing with underneath his costume. Her first instinct is to not pay any attention to them at all beyond vague surprise that they’re bright blue and not black, but they also inexplicably have Superman’s crest on the front, and she can’t just let that go.

Harley drags her eyes back up his body to his face, raising an eyebrow. “This isn’t weird?” she asks dryly, tracing the curve of the S with her fingertip. “Since you two are buddies and all or whatever?”

Nightwing covers his eyes, laughs breathlessly into his hands. “Part of a set,” he says. “Don’t wear any of them often in case anybody drops in when I’m trying to sleep, but th…” He trails off jerkily when she leans forward, mouths at him through the fabric and pretends to pay any attention at all to what he’s saying. “But I’m still supposed to be resting,” he continues, arms dropping numbly to his sides. “So.”

Harley drags the flat of her tongue over the printed cotton, looking up at him. He’s flushed, a little dazed; his head falling forward and his hair slipping into his eyes. She feels him twitch under her mouth, but he doesn’t move on purpose, which is frankly a little bit annoying.

Maybe he’s just as worried that she’ll pop out of existence now as she was when he first walked in. It’s a pretty irrational thought, but she likes it anyway.

“Why would anyone care?” she asks, kissing his thigh, grazing the angle of his hipbone with her teeth.

Nightwing lets out a small, shuddering sound, pushing forward without seeming to notice. She rewards him by cupping him in her hand, letting him rub against her palm. “You try explaining superhero-themed underwear to anyone in the Justice League,” he says. “I’ll wait.” His breath catches. “Actually, I won’t.”

Harley grins against his stomach. “So what you’re saying is that if I leave right now, you’ll start jerking yourself off on video?”

Nightwing’s laugh is a little tight. “You’d have to find my apartment to see it first, Harl.”

“Or you could just tell me where it is.” She insinuates her fingers underneath the elastic at his hips, pulling his underwear down with care.

“ _Or_ I could record you something better and—” He snaps his mouth shut. “I didn’t say that.”

“Uh-huh,” Harley says, kissing a slow line from the base of his erection to the tip before speaking again. “For the record, if you really wanted to, I wouldn’t mind doing it back.”

Nightwing actually whines when she sucks him into her mouth, a muscle twitching in his thigh as he tries to keep still. “Ask me again,” he says, “when you’re not—” And then he either forgets what he was saying or just gives up on saying it in favor of heaving in a breath. He still doesn’t move his hips, but he at least tangles the fingers of one hand in her hair, not quite holding her there but not exactly letting her move too much, either.

She pulls off of him. He lets her, disappointingly. “You know better than that,” she scoffs. “It’s not even my first rodeo with _you_ , Nightwing.”

He laughs breathlessly, but he must be adequately chastised, because he immediately guides her mouth back and slowly eases into it. His eyes are riveted on her face, watching her watching him, and she kind of wishes she’d at least let him take her pants off because there’s no way she can adequately do anything through a layer of denim.

Damn it.

She’s as slow with him as she can bear, skating her hands over every inch of skin available to her, rucking his shirt up so she can spread her palm over his fluttering heart. He’s tense, the muscles of his torso almost trembling, as if standing up is an exertion despite everything else the man can do before breaking a sweat. Harley hums softly around him and it’s like something fractures inside him, because he’s talking— _rambling_ —she’s amazing, she doesn’t know how incredible she is, not that he thinks she doesn’t think she’s, _oh_ , it’s just that no matter what she thinks of herself she’s still even better than that, if that makes any sense at all, she really can’t expect that much out of his communication skills when _fuck, Harley, he’s_ —

It’s probably at least a little bit of an indication of the kinds of places she’s lived, the kinds of things she’s seen, that Nightwing’s sunlit face when he comes is the most beautiful thing she’s ever laid eyes on in her life. It still doesn’t make it less true. He slides a couple of inches down the door, motionless but for the frenetic shudder of his hamstring under her fingers as he pulses over her tongue. Harley stays absolutely still until he’s done, figuring that even if he’s not quite as paranoid as he could be, he’d probably rather keep notable DNA samples away from anything that’s difficult to clean off. She’s being thoughtful, damn it.

The second he slips from her mouth, he scoots the rest of the way down the wall like a marionette suddenly missing its strings, crumpling to sit in front of her. Nightwing only gives himself a couple of seconds to catch his breath before his hand moves from her hair to the back of her neck, pulling her in and kissing her senseless.

“Think it’s your turn,” he breathes, gathering her into his lap and rolling them both effortlessly to the floor.

Harley doesn’t disagree, but she also doesn’t really have the mental capacity to say so at that moment.

* * *

“I should,” she says, after the sun has nearly finished fucking off and they’ve had to bring the flashlight out again, “probably head back to the station.”

Nightwing turns his head to look at her. They both put their clothes back on after they realized the floor was a little cold, but that was about all they’d done; Harley’s ribs and shoulder are starting to ache and she at least has the benefit of using him as a pillow. He can’t possibly be comfortable like that, she muses fretfully.

He was the one to tug and nudge her into this position in the first place. If he’s aggravating any of his injuries, it’s absolutely the floor’s fault and not hers… but that doesn’t mean the floor is a good place for him to be right now.

She’s pretty sure that’s not an argument she would win.

The shape of his cheek changes a little when he nibbles on the inside of it. “I could give you a ride,” he offers. “All the way to Gotham, if you don’t mind making the trip on a bike.”

“Depends,” she says, even though she’s starting to get the impression that it really doesn’t. “We talking the kind with pedals or the kind with an engine?”

Nightwing dimples terribly. “The second kind.”

She can’t resist. “I’m not the only Harley you’re riding?” she asks, wide-eyed and mock-hurt.

He snorts, rolling his head back to look at the ceiling. “It’s not a Harley,” he says dryly. “But I’m serious. As long as you promise not to try to bribe anyone into looking up the license plates.”  
Harley gasps. “That’s _cheating_ , Nightwing. It wouldn’t be me figuring it out.”

“I was thinking more that it’s illegal,” he answers, the corner of his mouth still pulled up. “Bad way to keep your nose clean.” He glances back at her, and his eyes are so damn warm, and she…

She wants to, she really wants to, but—and _damn_ this conscience that she’s somehow growing several years too late, because— “If people were already keepin’ an eye on me to get to you, wouldn’t they get a little suspicious of some random not-Nightwing guy taking me home from Blüdhaven?”

He hesitates. “Maybe,” he allows. “We’ll have to figure out a way to transition into that anyway, though, if we’re… moving this across identities.”

God, she hadn’t even thought of that particular set of mess. There’s been a certain air of freedom here, because it’s a little harder for Gotham-based whackos to keep track of what she does in Blüdhaven, but if they’re gonna be dating for real… that’s a little harder to do. “I guess I figured we could have a super angry breakup and the civilian you could be my terrible idea of a rebound,” she says.

“I’d be a _great_ rebound,” Nightwing says indignantly. “You could take me home to whatever family member you wanted.”

Harley grins. “My dad’s in jail,” she says.

He snickers, as if laughing at some joke she hasn’t quite caught on to yet. “Maybe not that one.” He pulls her a little closer with the arm she’s resting her head on, kisses between her eyebrows. “I don’t mind, Harl. Stay with me.”

Maybe Nightwing’s superpower is talking her into objectively terrible ideas. Harley relents. “Okay,” she says. “But seriously, you’re _not_ meeting my family. I like you too much to put you through that.”

His smile is adorably lopsided. “I like you too,” he says, like it’s a secret.

* * *

They make a detour to his apartment building to pick up a spare helmet for her; he won’t bring her upstairs, but he reasons (correctly) that she doesn’t have the patience to try and suss out who lives in every single one on the off-chance that she recognizes his name from somewhere. Whatever else he might have picked up from Batman, it wasn’t his driving habits; Nightwing is fiercely reasonable with those, apparently able to resist showing off for her when there’s a risk of skinning both of them with a highway. Which she appreciates.

She does laugh, breathless and delighted, as he curves onto the entrance ramp and the bike suddenly gains a burst of speed out of nowhere. She can’t see his expression (obviously), but she can feel a tiny answering chuckle with her arms around his waist.

Nightwing is at least paranoid enough to walk her upstairs (and out of sight) before kissing her goodbye, biting back a grin at the godawful things the helmet did to her hair and promptly making a real effort to worsen it.

And then he’s gone, and she really should go to bed, but she just… doesn’t. Harley wanders around the apartment aimlessly for a few minutes, microwaves herself some hot chocolate, finds herself smiling dumbly at the marshmallows.

She breaks out her colored pencils and gets to work.

* * *

You  
[2.18 AM] _Attachment: 00157.png  
_ [2.18 AM] _Attachment: 00158.png_  
[2.18 AM] Attachment: 00159.png

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[2.19 AM] nice

You  
[2.20 AM] Pick one  
[2.20 AM] Dork

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[2.20 AM] oh  
[2.20 AM] kinda like the second two  
[2.21 AM] depending on how much you want to look like we’re partners  
[2.21 AM] in crimefighting, I mean

You  
[2.22 AM] You’re no help

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[2.22 AM] in my defense it’s really late

* * *

You  
[2.23 AM] _Attachment: 00157.png  
_ [2.23 AM] _Attachment: 00158.png_  
[2.23 AM] Attachment: 00159.png

Treehugger  
[6.00 AM] Harley…

You  
[8.31 AM] Just  
[8.31 AM] Tell me what you think

Treehugger  
[8.32 AM] I think the last time you went down this road, it nearly killed you.  
[8.32 AM] And I think I want better for you than that.

You  
[8.33 AM] Different road  
[8.33 AM] NOT crime this time

Treehugger  
[8.34 AM] That’s not what I meant and you know it.

* * *

You  
[8.37 AM] _Attachment: 00157.png  
_ [8.37 AM] _Attachment: 00158.png_  
[8.37 AM] Attachment: 00159.png

Furry Trash  
[10.45 AM] Lose the hood on the second, use the colors from the third. Hood won’t stay up when you’re travelling and it’s too easy to grab. -B

You  
[12.03 PM] THANK you

Furry Trash  
[9.35 PM] Tell me when it’s done. -B

You  
[9.36 PM] Not gonna be a Robin

Furry Trash  
[9.37 PM] I wouldn’t ask you to be. Thought you might want to see what the other side of the equation can be like before you go solo. -B

You  
[9.38 PM] Who says im going solo  
[9.38 PM] Maybe this is for work

Furry Trash  
[9.38 PM] Harley Quinn wouldn’t wear that. -B

* * *

Harley is pretty sure that the entire fabric store recognizes her at this point, and she knows it’s not because of her Arkham days because they don’t look at her like she’s gonna murder their pets. (As if she ever would. People were apparently just fine, but she’s _never_ been evil enough to even glare at a cute little puppy or whatever.)

The woman behind the counter does do a little double-take at what Harley brings over, though. It takes Harley a few seconds to figure out that it’s probably because there’s yellow instead of white and not a hint of black to be found.

“Gonna be a superhero,” Harley says without inflection.

“Right,” says the cashier with a polite I-definitely-am-neither-confused-nor-slightly-threatened customer service smile.

Okay, so maybe this one recognizes her from her Arkham days. Whatever. Harley does her the courtesy of not saying anything particularly worrying and just getting out as quickly as possible.

Harley works on the costume every night after work. It feels like it shouldn’t take as long as it seems to be, but this… this is a little different from her previous attempts at making herself a new getup. Isn’t her mindlessly appliquéing diamonds onto a miniskirt because it sounds like it might work, or her clicking through random generators to find a new thing she can spin into an alternative. It isn’t even her stitching the original together, or any of its variations in the years afterward, because she was a starry-eyed idiot who knew she was crazy and thought she was in love, or because she was angry and addicted to Poison Ivy’s jadedness and trying to lash out at the whole human race for what the Joker did.

She wants to get this right.

Her bed ends up jammed into the corner, blocking off her storage closet; she pushes the sofa as close to the wall as is physically possible. The kitchen table, such as it is, holds the sewing machine. The floor ends up covered in so many cut and pinned pieces of fabric that she has to dance across the room just to get coffee in the morning. It’s almost maddeningly inconvenient, but she’s making progress, and she’s happy, and she can’t really ask for too much more than that.

* * *

Harley unlocks the door to her apartment, opens it, sees a shape on her couch, closes her door, and then freezes when her eyes finish communicating with her brain and let her know that there’s something deeply not right about this.

Because it’s not Nightwing on the sofa. It isn’t even Batman, as thoroughly silly as it would have been to imagine a hulking shadow sitting primly on a battered off-white sidewalk rescue. It’s Poison Ivy—not Pamela, because she hasn’t made her skin look normal, and she’s doing that thing where she’s pretending that growing leaves in a leotard shape equates to wearing clothes; not Pammie, because when she looks up at Harley her eyes are distant.

“Hi?” Harley attempts, in the ever-vain hope that pretending that there’s nothing screaming _one-person intervention_ about this will make it magically turn into a friendly visit. Between friends.

It doesn’t work. “Harley,” Poison Ivy says, somehow managing to sound simultaneously disappointed, concerned, and a little upset. “What are you doing?”

“Uh,” Harley says. She pulls her trenchcoat off and throws it onto the bed along with her purse. “Right now, kinda wonderin’ how you know where I live.”

“There are still plants in Gotham,” Poison Ivy answers. “All I had to do was listen.”

“That’s creepy, Pammie.” Harley steps gingerly around the pieces of what’s going to be a cape. (She’s never had a cape before, okay? She wants a cape. For one thing, it sounds like it’d be a little more forgiving in a Gotham winter than anything she’s used to wearing out.) “You coulda just asked.”

“I wasn’t sure that you would tell me.”

Harley fills the kettle and puts it on. Something about Pam being nearby with the scold-y voice on always makes her want chamomile. “That’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t I tell you?”

“Because of _this?_ ” Poison Ivy makes an expansive gesture to—well, to pretty much the entire apartment at this point. “Whatever you have with Nightwing is one thing, Harl, but this is…”

“I’m not doin’ it for him.”

“But what _is_ it?” Pamela presses, getting up from the sofa and crossing her arms.

She doesn’t— “How did you even get _in_ here?”

“I grew vines through the sidewalk and opened the window. Don’t change the subject.”

“I just wanted to… I dunno,” Harley says. She looks away.

“Harley,” Pam says. Her voice is quieter now, but no less firm underneath. “I want the truth.”

Code. Pammie used to do this back when they were still together, help Harley sort through all the conflicts in her head when it got too bad to figure out on her own, help her keep from lashing out or from going back. It doesn’t sound bad, now.

(She’s not human anymore. If Harley becoming something else, something new, is a threat to her own mission, then letting her put her planty bullcrap into the air might be the dumbest thing Harley could ever do. But it’s _Pam_ still, somewhere; she’d really cared, in her own stupid backwards you’re-okay-for-a-human-but-my-plants-will-always-come-first way.)

If Poison Ivy had wanted Harley under her thrall, she could have gassed the room before the door was even opened. She’s okay.

“Me too,” Harley says softly.

Pam takes a few steps closer, near-silent and unthinkingly fluid. She reaches out—for Harley’s cheek at first, but she falters, her hand finally settling on her shoulder instead. For a few long seconds, they both breathe. The air is sweet. Her tongue loosens, but she doesn’t say anything, not yet.

“Why are you doing this?” Pamela asks. Her voice is even.

The words come out so damn easy. It feels like something huge and weighty is shedding itself off with every syllable. “I’ve been thinking, and I feel bad about what I did before, and every time I try to just hang up the unitard for good it doesn’t work out, so I thought I should… let it not happen. Maybe make up for some of the crap I did.”

“Become a vigilante hero, like everyone else under Batman’s wing?” There’s just the slightest hint of bitterness, but Pam keeps it down. Harley aches suddenly.

“If I can,” she says.

“Is this because of Nightwing?”

Hesitation—not because the truth serum in the air isn’t working like it should, but because… that’s not a question Harley really knows the answer to. “It was my idea,” she says. “But I don’t know if I would have had it without him.”

Pamela doesn’t need to move, but she usually does; trying to keep any nearby humans at ease, or simply falling into old habits. She is deeply still now. “Why?”

“He’s good,” Harley says. “ _Really_ good, not just nice to me. He just… makes me want to be better.”

“In order to ‘deserve’ him?”

“Nah. Just because.” Harley frowns even through the desperate clawing freedom of this brand of honesty. “You okay, Pam? You never got this leading-questions-y before.”

Poison Ivy flinches then. Her hand slips off of Harley’s shoulder as she looks out the window instead. “You know I can’t stop my mission,” she says softly.

“Well, duh.”

“So you also know that if you go through with yours, we can’t—we’ll be fighting each other, Harl. Eventually, if not right this second.”

Oh. Harley hadn’t stopped to think about that particular set of consequences, but the word is still pulled out of her like a fish on a line: “Yeah.”

Pamela steps away, examining the pattern of infinitesimal leaflets wandering to the backs of her hands. “I wouldn’t ask you to choose between this and me,” she says. “And I won’t cut you out the moment you decide to put that costume on. It wouldn’t be fair. I just want to know you understand _everything_ that it would mean if you do.”

Harley nods mutely.

“It won’t just be running around rooftops and beating up muggers, Harl. It won’t even be teaming up with Batman for the span of a day in order to save the world.” It’s hard to tell whether the truth serum works on its mistress too or whether Pamela just needs to get this out before it kills her. “You’ll have to go up against a lot of old friends.”

Harley swallows. “I know,” she says. None of the other _old friends_ are worth it, but Pam—

But she’s already fought her. She already swooped in and screwed her plans up, and they’re still here. Pammie’s the only one that it would hurt to lose, and she hasn’t lost her _yet_ , so… maybe.

Poison Ivy nods sharply. “As long as you do,” she says, voice distant and clipped. It stings a little, but not as badly as it does when she turns and goes towards the door with quiet purpose.

“Pam,” Harley says. The other woman stops in her tracks. “See you around?”

Pam’s smile is strained, but it’s there. “Of course,” she says, and walks out.

* * *

Three nights later, she pulls the outfit on, attaches the mask, and goes to meet up with Batman in the clock tower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi my name is Emily and I keep accidentally putting sadness in things
> 
> If you liked the blowjob scene, you have LordVitya/Protodan to thank for his lovely beta-ness; I wasn't sure how I felt about the entire first half of it but he voted to keep it in in its entirety so here we are!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we have a conclusion that ended up being long enough to require being split up, again!

Batman seems… not surprised to see Harley, maybe (she’s not sure she’s ever seen him surprised, come to think of it; angry, exasperated, bored, blank, worried, all kinds of things, but never really caught off-guard by much of anything). But he’s maybe pleased to, if she has to hazard a guess at the expression of a man whose face she can’t see. And whose primary hobby is standing around being totally unreadable in those rare moments when he isn’t brooding or fighting crime.

Oh god. Does she even get to make those jokes anymore? She’s going to be right there with him.  _ Damn _ it.

“Hey there,” she says with a little wave. The mask feels weird now that she’s modded it a little, trimmed it down and flared it out so it fits with the rest of the pattern a bit better. She’d considered her old strategy of just painting it on, but…

Okay, maybe she’s irrationally worried that wearing face paint for more than her day job or a one-off fluke possible extinction event will make her backslide right back into her old habits. So sue her. Therapists willing to take on ex-supervillains in this town usually end up becoming supervillains themselves. (She would know.)

“What’s your name?” Batman replies, as if that’s a totally normal and not weird at all way to respond.

“Uh, Bats?” she says. “You get whacked on the head on your way up? You’ve known me for  _ years _ .”

“I don’t mean your civilian name,  _ Doctor _ . And if I’m not mistaken, Harley Quinn retired not long ago.”

“There’s one way to put it,” she mutters, suddenly fascinated by the worn wood beneath her boots.

Batman ignores her. “You want to start over? Start over. Tell me your name.”

Harley opens her mouth, closes it, finds herself no less confused, and opens it again. “It can’t be that simple, B,” she protests. (Why is she even arguing this? This is a  _ good _ thing.)

“Maybe it can. You just never thought to try.”

“That’s—” But he’s got that face on that kind of looks like the human approximation of a brick wall, so she doesn’t bother. “Never mind. I’m still figuring it out.” Which is absolute bullcrap, but it’s easier than trying to explain the backstory to her main option without sounding more than a little bit creeptastic.

Or pathetic. Her definitions on a lot of things are a little bit skewed.

Batman inclines his head. “You’ve put a lot of thought into a design that doesn’t have a name yet,” he remarks, but doesn’t push. He brushes past her, heading for the stairs. “Come with me.”

Ugh, she can’t—she just can’t, not when he’s being nice about things in his weird not-actually-saying-words way. “Promise you won’t… I dunno, think it’s weird. Or dumb?” Which it is neither of those things, but… whatever.

Batman pauses at the top of the steps, turns back to face her. “I could read you the current roster of the Justice League,” he says mildly.

Well, now she’s curious as all hell, because all the ones she knows about have either really cool or really adequate names. But that’s for later. (Also, does he seriously have the whole list memorized? Aren’t there a hundred of them floating around up there by now?) “Flamebird?” Harley says, and her voice sounds weirdly quiet even to herself.

It’s not like it even really  _ matters _ , right? It’s none of Batman’s business what she calls herself. It’s not even any of Nightwing’s. Or anybody’s. But she just… she wants to get it right, this time, and the fact that she doesn’t know how to tell if she is or not is kinda throwing her for a loop over here.

If Batman has any kind of reaction to that at all, it doesn’t show. He pauses thoughtfully, as though mulling it over, before he finally responds. “Good to meet you, Flamebird,” he says. And then, absurdly, “I’m Batman.”

Her laugh is as much relief as amusement. “I know who you are, dummy.”

He cracks what might be an entire quarter of a smile. “Good,” he says.

* * *

“I have one rule,” he says. The Batmobile startles her, again, with how quiet it is on the inside—or maybe just by how quiet it is when it isn’t screaming down the road and crashing through the wall to scare the everliving shit out of her mid-scheme. Hard to tell.

“Just one?” Harley asks, eyes narrowed.

“Two,” he allows. “But the second gets broken by everyone in that seat but you, so far.” He gives her a sharp look out the side of his lenses, just for a second, before returning his eyes to the road. “Don’t break that pattern.”

“Oookay,” she says, not sure if she should point out the fact that she can’t exactly not break a rule that she doesn’t know about yet. He’ll get to it, probably. Maybe? Or at least warn her first if she looks like she’s getting close? He’s nice-ish like that. “What’s the one rule that’s not really a rule, then?”

“No one gets murdered inside Gotham if I can help it.” And, judging by that tone of voice, his definition of ‘inside Gotham’ probably includes a couple of the neighboring towns as well, but she doesn’t really want to ask. “Not by you, not by me, not by anyone I work with. Accidents happen. Deliberate killing never should.”

“Seems simple enough,” Harley says cautiously. “I mean, how hard is it to  _ not _ kill someone, right?”

Batman gives her a Look. “Harder than you think it is. You know that.”

“That wasn’t—” but there’s no way she can possibly say anything without sounding terrible. It was terrible, objectively. Half her kill count, there wasn’t even a particular reason; they were in the way, or she was told to, or they got on her nerves one too many times and the Joker had rubbed off on her more than she cared to admit at the time. Not exactly the best new-first-impression to make. “I wouldn’t really  _ know _ ,” she corrects herself. “I’m new to the hero business, remember? Not exactly used to not killin’ people I really want to.”

“Really?” Batman says, downshifting on a particularly tight curve. “Because I would have thought there would be more corpses in the lighthouse if that were the case.”

That doesn’t count. Batman was right there and he would have kicked her ass, and Nightwing was right there and it would have broken his poor bleeding heart. She couldn’t have done it even if she’d wanted t—okay, she wanted to a lot, but mostly she just wanted to get Nightwing out. Murder was just the second thing on her list of priorities at the time anyway so it really wasn’t something she had to resist that hard.

“I thought we were doing a fresh start thing,” she complains, instead. “No fair bringing up other stuff.”

Batman does that tight-lipped sort-of-a-smile again and says nothing. He continues saying nothing until it gets a little uncomfortable.

“Hey,” Harley says. “What’s the second rule?”

He gives a long-suffering sigh for a solid two seconds. “Don’t,” he says, “switch the police scanner to the radio. And  _ don’t _ turn it to the pop station.”

Harley covers her mouth, bites back a giggle, fails completely. “Isn’t that two rules?”

“Not if you’re Nightwing, it isn’t.”

* * *

He pulls up to an abandoned warehouse, which is about the least surprising thing she can imagine—it honestly feels sometimes that Gotham is half comprised of the damn things, and would probably be a little less crime-riddled if they just tore them all down and replaced them with something else. Coffee shops, maybe. Nobody ever got murdered in a coffee shop, right? And if they did, they probably deserved it.

Almost makes her a little nostalgic. Not  _ actually _ , of course, because the old days sucked all kinds of ass (for her, anyway), but… eh, whatever. Emotions don’t have to be reasonable. She saw her share of abandoned warehouses with Ivy.

Got beaten up in her share of abandoned warehouses, too, which should really make her  _ less _ okay with them, but what can you do?

“So,” Harley says, fiddling with her gloves. The seams haven’t started pulling yet, but they probably will if she keeps that up.

“Smugglers,” Batman says. “I’m not sure of what yet. I mean to find out.”

“And you took me here for… what? ’Cause I gotta say, Bats, I don’t think either one of us is cut out to play the good cop.” But hey, maybe that’s exactly the point. Bad cop, bad cop. Maybe?

Batman gives her a glance. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “I only just met Flamebird.”

Harley rolls her eyes. She has the feeling she’s gonna get really tired of this really fast. “Yeah, but you didn’t just meet  _ me _ ,” she says. “Couldn’t make me good cop if you, I dunno. Put me through a seminar or something. That metaphor got away from me.”

Batman huffs a breath out through his nose. “I wasn’t going to ask you to help me with the interrogation,” he says. “I just want you to help me take the rest of them out. Make them scatter if you can. I’ll grab one and question them separately while you go after the rest.”

“If I’m making them freak out and run, won’t some of them get away?”

That’s definitely a smile, but not a reassuring one. “I’m counting on it,” he says. “These are petty criminals, Flamebird, not a big-name villain’s thugs. Scare them badly enough, let them think they got away, and some of them won’t bother coming back.”

“Nobody’s scared of  _ this _ , though.” Harley gestures vaguely to herself. “Not in this getup, anyway.”

Batman opens the Batmobile door and readies his grapnel. “They will be,” he says, and shoots off into the air with barely a whisper of sound—until he smashes through the highest window and the shouts of alarm start up.

Well. It’s not much of a pep talk, but she’ll take what she can get. Flamebird doesn’t bother with her own grapnel; she darts up to the side door, inspects the knob for a moment, and kicks the thing open.

“Guess what, assholes!” she calls out just to get everyone’s attention, realizes that she has absolutely nothing to follow that one-liner up with, and just pistol-whips somebody with her grapnel instead.

She’s new to this. She’ll sort it out eventually.

* * *

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[11.39 PM] might want to try shouting your name at some witnesses next time  
[11.39 PM] people think you’re Robin right now

You  
[11.40 PM] Godfuckingdamnit

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[11.41 PM] hey it wasn’t so bad  
[11.41 PM] could give you a few pointers if you like :]

You  
[11.42 PM] Nope  
[11.43 PM] You can show me the ropes if you want though  
[11.43 PM] ;D

Boyfriend Maybe? ♥ (ICE)  
[11.44 PM] aww  
[11.44 PM] wish I’d thought of that

* * *

You  
[12.04 AM] Sorry

Treehugger  
[6.00 AM] Me too.

* * *

Vigilante justice-ing on a work night was a dumb plan, Harley realizes when she wakes up. It’s not that she oversleeps, even though she really wishes she could have; it’s that when she wakes up, infuriatingly on time, she’s pretty sure she’s just straight-up dying. Her eyeballs hurt and she’s not sure if it’s sleep deprivation or catching an unlucky elbow to the face.

There’s only one black eye in the bathroom mirror when she looks. Sleep, then. And also Classic Harley, then, because there aren’t too many variants that would require as much makeup as it’ll take to make herself  _ not _ look like she beat up thirteen people by herself last night. (She counted. She’s very proud of herself.)

“Ow,” Harley says to her reflection. Her reflection does not do anything in particular in return, which is very reassuring and a pretty good indication that her mental state hasn’t taken a nosedive. At least, not that kind.

She spends about twenty minutes practically ladling concealer around her eye socket; it’ll look pretty funky and it probably won’t last the full day, but it really only has to stay on until she gets to work and covers the whole thing up with greasepaint. And then she can do the whole thing over again for the walk home.

Hooray.

Eh, screw it. She chose this, she guesses.

* * *

She hears about herself at work while eavesdropping on one of the tables. The things they say aren’t  _ entirely _ complimentary—though she’s absolutely dead certain they think that they are—but it’s… weirdly cool. She’s never been on this side of the equation before, where the her with tights and the her with whatever’s clean and at the top of her laundry basket are two totally separate people. It’s a little neat.

And they do raise a pretty solid question: is there gonna be someone taking up her costume  _ here _ , as soon as somebody gets a decent enough look at her to describe it?

She would totally volunteer for that, though. It would be  _ hilarious. _

* * *

When Harley limps her way home (turns out that working a whole shift on her feet after running around fighting crime or whatever kinda hurts; who knew?), she somehow almost misses the enormous envelope stuffed under her door. Which is almost catastrophic, because she would have tripped on the damn thing if she had.

She stares at it. It resolutely lies on the floor and continues being an enormous envelope.

It looks surprisingly un-shady. She still doesn’t trust it, but she at least gives it the courtesy of bending over—slowly—and picking it up off the floor.

It’s heavy as hell. The 17-year-old Harley applying to every university more than two state lines away from her mom is pretty sure that’s a good thing. The 27-year-old Harley who’s been getting skeevy invites to do skeevy shit in skeevy countries is pretty sure it’s the worst thing ever. They both make a truce with the tiny little spark of optimism inside her that hasn’t quite gotten snuffed out yet.

Harley flops down onto her couch and opens it. Inside are several pages of some very nice paper covered in very clean and innocuous-looking text. With the logo of Wayne Enterprises’ entertainment division splashed on top.

She frowns.

It’s a pitch—or the beginnings of a pitch, anyway, for some kind of… tongue-in-cheek Dr. Phil kind of show with her as the host. And that’s all the detail that it gives, because that’s apparently all the detail that they’ve got worked out so far, because there’s some little ramble in there that looks to translate to ‘creative freedom’. On  _ her _ part.

“The fuck,” says Harley. The pitch says nothing.

The very last page has a list of contact information and a pale blue sticky note in quick, easy handwriting.

_ Think about it. -B.W. _

And that makes even  _ less _ sense, because none of the contacts on there have those initials, and the only person she can think of who’d be  _ involved _ with this who has those initials is the one whose name is on half the buildings in Gotham, and why the hell would  _ Bruce Wayne _ have any kind of personal interest in this? Okay, maybe she could kind of get it if this had happened  _ months _ ago, when she’d finally been declared sane enough for release and well-behaved enough for parole, but she’d been doing her damnedest to fade as far into the background as she could ever since. Especially after it was made incredibly clear to her that she’d never be able to return to psychiatry, psychology, therapy, or anything even vaguely related to any of those things again.

There’s no reason he’d even know that she was still kicking, not after she was being very much not a threat for a few months. There’s no reason he’d even be thinking about this now, let alone personally asking her to give it some thought, let alone the  _ day after _ she—

Wait.

_ Wait. _

“Oh,” says Harley.

* * *

Dick Grayson was orphaned when he was ten years old, his parents falling to their awful crunching deaths from the ropes he’d only just let go of himself. Bruce Wayne, apparently moved by his own experience of his parents’ violent deaths, took him in: first as his ward, just until everything settled down and the apparent murderer was caught; and then, after several years had passed and they were still getting along pretty okay, actually adopting him for real.

_ Something like _ running away to join the circus. He’d referred to Batman as being his father more than once.

Nightwing has a name.

Harley was just a kid herself when Dick’s parents were killed, and she was out of state to boot; she hadn’t heard about it then. She vaguely remembers reading about it later on, somewhere on the list of terrible news articles that her mother had dug up to scare her off of going to University of Gotham and absolutely, definitely getting herself killed in one of the city’s purportedly constant drive-bys. Why, this family was only in Gotham for a few  _ days _ and this poor child—

(Her mother had not been at all amused at Harley’s retaliatory stack of equally awful reports of the crap that went on in  _ their _ neighborhood, or her decision to just up and vanish when it became clear that this wasn’t a fight that had an ending.)

Wayne clearly liked the spotlight himself (and was  _ that _ just a ploy, too? Another way to make himself Obviously Not Batman, because Bats liked lurking in the dark and Bruce Wayne was about as public as a human being could get? How deep did his deceptions go, anyway?), but he was good at keeping Dick out of it; there’s very little of him featured on even the least scrupulous stalking-vaguely-famous-people websites after the murder investigation died down. There’s a little blip of him moving to Blüdhaven, mock-excited theories about whether he was fighting with Bruce, blah blah blah. Bruce had kept surprisingly quiet on the matter, but it read more like him just wanting to respect Dick’s privacy than anything else.

It doesn’t tell her much about him as a person. But… there’s nothing saying that it’s anything more or less than what he’s shown her. He’s got some of Batman’s traits, but he’s not Batman. The difference between Dick Grayson and Nightwing could very well be—and probably is—just tight pants and a domino mask.

(Harley would wonder when she got so damned trusting, but she knows exactly when. Maybe not the second, but definitely the right timeframe, and  _ absolutely _ the reason why.)

Harley drops the sheaf of papers on the ground to be picked up later, leans back on her sofa, and stares at the ceiling. This doesn’t have to change anything, she tells herself. She doesn’t have to even let him know that she knows, doesn’t have to let it start bleeding over into his civilian life or her newfound vigilante one. She could let herself be scared, if she wants.

Except the fear doesn’t come.

* * *

You  
[7.03 PM] Thanks for the note  
[7.04 PM] So filmings in Bludhaven right

Furry Trash Boss  
[9.58 PM] I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I’m sure that could be arranged. -B

* * *

She wants to go to Blüdhaven pretty much the second she finally puts the last few pieces together, but there’s work (she wouldn’t be the first to not bother giving her two weeks’, and it really startles the manager when she actually does, but she remembers what a hellhole it was the last time somebody left without a warning and she doesn’t hate her coworkers enough for that), and there’s Flamebird (she takes Nightwing’s advice and actually tells people her name, and not even just people she’s beating up at the time), and there just really isn’t a good time. For four days. If she wasn’t crazy before, she’d go insane just from her own sheer impatience.

Her text to Nightwing—Dick—is practically perfunctory; she just barely remembers to send it before getting on the train.

In her defense, she’s kind of otherwise occupied. Mostly with nerves, but a little bit with—okay, yeah, it’s just nerves. She’s still not… she’s not scared of  _ him _ , exactly; she’s not scared at all, exactly. But she’s something. Excited, maybe, but in a weird way that also kind of makes her want to jump out of the nearest window. Except she’s in a train, so that’s a bad idea, and the windows don’t open anyhow.

She’ll just have to jump out of a window later.

* * *

They could meet at his safehouse—it would probably make more sense, and it would probably be more secure, but after just the general progression of their relationship this whole time… rooftops just feel like their thing. She sits on the edge of the one she vandalized for their first booty call, kicking her feet over the streetlights below. The sun is just thinking about setting all the way; the very last rays of it are just barely haloing the outlines of the city buildings. A sliver of moon balances on top of a billboard a few streets away. Cities are never quiet, but this one feels like it might be doing its best to be.

It’s kinda pretty. It’s no Gotham, but it could do. And maybe… hell, maybe getting away from Gotham for a little could do her good. (Could at least keep her farther away from running into Ivy when they’ve both got the tights on—or, well, when Harley has the tights on and Ivy’s wearing herself like the weird leafy nudist she is at heart. This is one of the first decisions she’s made in years that she hasn’t regretted within days, and she’s not about to make that part any harder on herself.)

Nightwing is punctual. She doesn’t hear him before she sees him, because he’s on his ninja bullshit again, but he’s at least nice about it; he doesn’t pop up out of nowhere. Out of the corner of her eye, she just sees a tall black-and-blue figure step into her periphery, fold himself down, and sit beside her. Their knees touch. “Hey,” he says.

She looks over at him, grins. “Hey,” she agrees. “So… how many points get deducted if your dad got impatient with my detective skills and kicked me a little?”

He sucks in a fraction of a breath, then lets it out in a soft chuckle. “None?” he says. “I wasn’t grading you, H—Flamebird.”

“Good to know,” she says. She keeps looking at the street. (Even if she wanted to, she doesn’t think she could keep the smile from pulling at her lips when she hears him correct himself. She’s heard that name from Batman and from three separate randos on the Internet that she’s probably never met, but hearing it from Nightwing just… makes it a little more real. In a good way.) “’Cause he did. He always this meddle-y?”

His heel bounces against the concrete on the edge of the roof. Harley can just barely see him keep glancing over at her every few seconds. “You have no idea,” he says. “And trust me, I am going to have to ask about that as soon as we’re done here, but… well. If you’re trying to trick me into thinking you’ve already figured me out so I’ll tell you by accident, it’s not happening.” His voice is light, still playful and all that, but there’s an excited tension under the levity. Impatience, probably.

For all the other crap he got from his mentor, he sure as hell didn’t inherit how damn hard Batman is to read.

“I would  _ never _ ,” she says, mock-offended, pausing for just long enough to make it seem like the end of the statement and then: “…think of that.”

He rewards her with a hitching little chuckle that just warms her right down to her marrow because she’s absolutely freakin’ hopeless at this point. “I dunno,” he says. “You can be pretty devious. Fooled me pretty well a few times.”

Harley looks at him, finally. He has the mask on, of course, but she doesn’t need to see his eyes to know that he’s on edge—metaphorically as well as literally. He’s pretending not to, but his body is angled subtly towards her, tension in the corners of his mouth, his thumb drumming silently on the rough surface of the concrete by his thigh.

She smiles, then hesitates. “I mean,” she says, suddenly going back over every single possible negative point on the pro-con list for meeting up here, “if you don’t mind me just blurting out names here?”

“I only have the one,” he says. “And no one’s listening in. We’re clean.”

One of these days she’s gonna ask him how he knows that—if he just does a city-wide sweep for bugs every night (probably not), if he’s got some weird Bat-gadget tucked away somewhere ( _ where? _ That suit doesn’t even leave room for  _ imagination _ , let alone pockets, and his belt’s pretty basic too for what it is), some third option she can’t guess at. It’s kind of hard to care when he’s waiting on her, though.

“Dick Grayson,” Harley says, and his smile is immediate and as radiant as the sun itself. Or, well, the sun when it’s not a solid seven-eighths down the horizon.

“Got it in one,” he says, and then he leans over and kisses her breathless.

* * *

They can’t stay there forever, as much as Harley irrationally wants to at that exact moment. He has to go and actually  _ patrol _ , for one thing, and she…

She wants to go with him. So she offers, and he does that absolutely  _ delighted _ smile again, and she can feel herself slipping sideways even harder. Somehow.

It’s a slow night, and kind of a cliched one at that. There is, against all odds, an actual mugging going on that they just so happen to trip over; it throws Nightwing for a loop just as much as her, and it actually takes a few seconds to even figure out who’s going to deal with it since one guy with a gun doesn’t exactly need two people.

(Harley ends up volunteering by dropping down on the guy’s head from on top of the dumpster. He probably would have heard her coming if he hadn’t been shouting so damn much, but his dazed body doesn’t seem to appreciate her advice.)

The last thing he needs to do is also the most boring thing he possibly could: sitting across the street and staring at a door for a solid hour and a half. He doesn’t need her there, she’s not exactly the most stealthy individual at the best of times, and two people staring at a door is a lot more noticeable than one person staring at a door. Especially if one of the people ends up falling asleep out of sheer boredom fifteen minutes in.

So he tells her his apartment number instead, along with the much more useful detail that it’s on the corner of the building farthest from the street.

“I’m sure you’ll find a way in,” he adds with the kind of smile that is probably illegal in at least fifteen countries. Give or take. “But the window is probably easier.”

* * *

The window is definitely easier. The window is so much easier that there are scratches on the brickwork that are unmistakably grapnel-related. It’s probably a good thing that nobody could see them unless they were already trying to get in, or his home wouldn’t be much of a hideout in the end.

(His freakin’ home. She really shouldn’t be getting so many tingly warm chest feelings about this, but if she managed to sort out the concept of being more flustered by his naked face than his naked  _ literally everything else _ , she’s sure she can work through this too.)

Harley is a pretty hard girl to freak out these days, but even she feels her heart rate spike a little bit at being forced to dangle several storeys off the ground, suspended by a little handful of claws hooked into worryingly smooth concrete, as she tries to shimmy a window open from the outside. While being weighed down with a backpack, because she had the foresight to swing by the hideout to pick up her other clothes before coming. Either Dick has just gotten so used to this kind of thing that it doesn’t bother him anymore (likely, from what she knows of him), or his sense of healthy fear and self-preservation are completely shot to hell ( _ incredibly _ likely, given that he was willing to start up this relationship in the first place).

Hell, it’s probably both.

“Come  _ on, _ ” she pleads with the window. “I can’t die like this. I’ve been facing my inner demons and shit. I’ve been making emotional progress, goddammit.”

The window does not respond to her words. It does, however, respond to her pushing the business end of her sewing scissors underneath the sill and prying it the half inch upwards she needs to jam her fingers in there and figure it out the rest of the way. Harley pushes away from the wall just to give her the momentum to swing most of her body through it when she comes back, and then discovers that the backpack has also destroyed her sense of balance when she mostly just ends up crashing to the floor when she gets the lower half of her torso in.

Eh. Better that than… well, any of the alternative things she could have crashed into. Such as the ground. She presses the release button on her grapnel, lets the line coil itself back up into the body of the thing, and slides the window  _ most _ of the way closed. And then she stubs her toe on a table or sofa or something, because Dick turned the lights out before he left.

This is going great so far.

Harley glares into the darkness just to ensure that whatever she jammed her foot into is adequately chastised, and then she starts making her way across the room. Carefully. Light switches are usually next to doors, and doors are usually at the exact opposite side of the room as windows, and—

And there’s a phone in her backpack with a flashlight on it and she’s an idiot.

She fumbles through way too many pockets before she manages to find it, but she crosses the room without incident after that, and successfully locates the switch. Truly, she is incredible. A bastion of basic functioning human behavior.

Dick’s apartment is… pretty unremarkable, actually. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, but maybe something out of a Bond movie, with big-ass bookshelves and dimensions that only kind of made sense because the big-ass bookshelves were actually just hiding secret rooms full of… whatever it is that Nightwing needs to keep in his home. But nah, it just looks like a place somebody lives in.

It’s a nicer place than what she’s got, but what she’s got is a couple of steps above a literal dumpster, so that doesn’t say much. The kitchenette is split up from the rest of the place by a half-wall. There’s an adorable little pot on it with a spiky little plant that Pam would disown Harley for not recognizing on sight.

(She wonders if it has a name. And then she wonders if he’d let her name it if it doesn’t.)

His fridge is a fairly standard white thing that’s humming quietly in the corner. He’s got more magnets on it than there are actual things to hold up with them—in fact, the one thing that would need it in the first place (a memo pad with what appears to be obscure Star Trek trivia printed on each sheet) has a magnet glued to the back anyway, so it’s completely pointless. She spots a surprisingly complete set of Justice League emblems in their number, a Rebel Alliance symbol, a tiny Stitch in adorably ugly mid-wave, a Hufflepuff crest ( _ of course _ , she thinks), and more word magnets than is entirely reasonable for any one person to have. The only coherent sentences he’s spelled out with them are  _ the crab king is victorious _ and  _ why was the sword fight ing octopus there? _ She tries to find a deeper meaning in any of this before finally deciding that there is none.

Harley considers the list of unused words for a while before finally spelling out  _ touch the as s _ . Not particularly inspired, but she’s sure she can come up with something better later. She moves on.

There is a door next to the kitchenette entrance, cracked about an inch open, but that just leads to the bathroom. He’s got an unsurprisingly well-stocked medicine cabinet; he keeps a better eye on his own miscellaneous injuries than she does, even—although, to be fair, he also had more of a reason to expect them than she did until she picked up this particular hobby. He has a little stash of concealer and some  _ really _ nice makeup brushes under the sink, so whatever he does as a day job is presumably not the kind of thing where he can routinely explain black eyes away. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a regular, non-dangerous job, technically. Just, that it’s not, like… an MMA fighter or something.

(Harley wonders, absently, how hard he’d be able to kick everyone’s asses if he were. Not exactly the best way to keep a low profile, she thinks. Okay, not that Bruce fucking Wayne keeps a low profile either, but at least he doesn’t routinely show off his ninja skills while he’s being an incredibly public billionaire.)

The main room is pretty sparse; he has a nice couch, a little bit worn down but still retaining decent lumbar support, and long enough for even someone of his dumb height to comfortably lie down on. The thing that she stubbed her toe on turns out to be the squat little cabinet his television is on, which explains why it didn’t even move a little bit when she did it. Next to the couch, nestled up on the wall, is a bookshelf; it’s mostly books with no particular pattern to genre, author, or length. She does note several Robin Hood-related things, including a copy of his Merry Adventures that looks older than Harley is. (There’s no way she’s picking it up to verify that. She’s a little scared.) He also appears to have the complete DVD set of  _ Star Trek: The Next Generation _ , a bunch of slightly lesser-known Disney movies (including Robin Hood again), and a copy of  _ The Princess Bride _ .

Cute.

Opposite of the kitchenette and the bathroom is another door, left wide open. Harley gets up from the crouch she’d dropped into to inspect his movie collection and wanders in the (hopefully, or else she’s gonna get a little mad) last remaining room she hasn’t looked in yet.

Hey, he has an actual bed. Good for him. (If she’s honest, the size of the couch had gotten her a  _ little _ worried that he just passed out there every night.) It’s not particularly interesting to look at—it’s been made, but not perfectly, so she can at least feel slightly less intimidated than if it had been preternaturally neat. There’s an inside-out pair of pants slung over the footboard. The sheets are sky-blue, the blanket huge and fluffy and navy. She wastes no time in dropping her backpack to the floor and falling face-first into the mattress and is rewarded with a satisfying  _ whumph _ sound. Excellent.

She’s not sure if she’s gratified that he apparently washes his sheets pretty often or disappointed that they smell like fabric softener more than they smell like him.

Harley rolls over and sits up, kicking her feet absently. There’s a closet in the corner. She wonders if it has a false back or something for him to keep his gadgets in without incident, but finds herself suddenly far too comfortable to bother investigating. He also has an inconspicuous little dresser with his keys, wallet, and a couple of well-worn books on it.

She stops short of going through his wallet. That’s probably just a few steps across the line between ‘curious and having been given permission to snoop at least a little bit’ and ‘actually a tad creepy’.

There’s not really anything else to look at or do, she’s not hungry enough to start going through his cabinets, and she’s not tired enough to fall asleep where she lies. She should probably get out of the costume before she does much of anything else, and she should  _ definitely _ hop in the shower before she gets her vigilante justice sweat all over his bedclothes. Reluctantly, she drags herself to her feet, rifles through her backpack—

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put clothes she’s already worn half the day back on just after she’s taken a shower, does it?

Harley peels out of her costume, jams it into the bag, and walks over to his dresser instead.

* * *

She hopes that he’ll just sort of show up while she’s in the middle of her shower, but she doesn’t take nearly enough time in there for it. Instead, there’s a quiet knock on the bathroom door while she’s in the middle of trying to sort out how to get a comb through hair that’s way too long for anything but a regular brush to do much of anything.

“I’m pretty sure this is your apartment, Dick,” Harley says, but she opens the door for him anyway.

“It is,” he says. It’s hard to tell with the mask still on, but his head tilts a little downwards, and she gets the impression that he’s watching a stray water droplet make its way from her neck down her collarbone and into the towel. (He has nice towels. Very fluffy.) “But I’m pretty sure this isn’t far enough into a relationship to start walking in on each other on the toilet.”

She considers this. “Eh,” she concedes, and returns to fighting with her hair. He crosses behind her, dropping a kiss onto her damp shoulder, his hand brushing her waist for just barely long enough to feel it. “Taking a shower?”

Dick makes a small, affirmative noise, opening the cabinet under the sink and going for the bottle of adhesive remover.

“Need any help?” Harley asks hopefully, leaning against the doorframe.

A smile pulls at the left side of his mouth. “I’m pretty sure it would take longer if you did,” he says, and starts getting to work detaching the domino mask from his skin.

“I’m just making sure you’re being thorough,” she says primly, but can’t school her expression into behaving alongside her voice. Ah, well.

He chuckles softly. “Tell you what,” he says. “You can inspect my thoroughness as much as you like after I come back out.”

She’s pretty sure she had a response to that, but then he started taking his costume off with methodical efficiency, and she’d much rather look at that than try to think about words anyway. He grins at her before he gets into the shower and closes the rippled glass sliding door. He knows.

Not that she was being particularly stealthy, either way. She still sticks her tongue out at him before she chucks the towel over the rack, pulls her borrowed shirt over her head, and wanders out. Back to the bed it is; even if any hygiene inspecting she puts him through  _ doesn’t _ end up going somewhere sexual (which would probably mean the world was coming to an end, if she had to guess), the whole running around and justice-ing thing is starting to catch up with her. She’s not necessarily sleepy yet, but she definitely wants to lie down for a bit, if nothing else.

(Dick hums in the shower when he’s alone, she learns. Harley holds her breath, but can’t quite catch the song. It’s still really, really cute.)

He doesn’t take long, but she’s still halfway to dozing off just from how freakin’ comfy his bed is when the water finally shuts off. She tries to wake up again, but her body just won’t do it; all she really manages is yawning and stretching her legs out a little. It’s hard to care, though.

The door opens. She hears footsteps padding softly out, the flick of a light switch, more footsteps, another light. The bedroom door swings silently shut, a dresser drawer opens; Harley cracks an eyelid open so she can watch him digging a pair of underwear out of it, savoring the few seconds of his unclothed ass before he pulls them on. He glances over to her, smiles almost exclusively with his eyes, and goes to turn out the light.

“Mmrh,” she says, pushing herself up on her elbows. “I was s’posed to inspect you and stuff.”

A breath of colder air shoves itself into her little pocket of warm bedclothes, but thankfully replaces itself with Dick’s body before she has time to really work up any irritated noises about it. “You can’t do it by touch?” he asks lightly, settling down on his side and pulling her close.

Harley capitulates to the tug without a fight, rolling over to face him and draping her arm over his torso. Her knee ends up between his, her ankle hooked over his calf. His skin is warmer than usual from the shower; she ends up nearly wrapping her whole body around him, shivering slightly—not because she was cold before, but because the difference in temperature between them is just enough for her to notice. “I could,” she says, kissing his chin because it happens to be easier to reach than the rest of his face just then. “But I like looking at you.” She yawns again, relaxing against her will.

“I noticed,” he says, voice warm with affection. “You—” And he pauses, and then he’s yawning too, as much as he tries to cut it off in the pillow. “Damn it, Harley,” he murmurs toothlessly. “Stop that.”

“You stop it.”

“You started it.”

She doesn’t have a counterargument for that, so she huffs and tucks her head under his chin instead. Because that’ll show him, or something.

He is altogether too happy to just wrap his arms around her a little tighter and let her be cuddly instead of being irrationally chastised by it. “If you want me to turn the light back on, you’ll have to let me get up, Harl.”

“’s fine,” she says. “I’ll stare at you in the morning.”

* * *

He’s still there when she wakes up for real.

Harley has spent enough nights crashing at his hideout when she got a little too deep in her investigation that the lurch of confusion at  _ this isn’t my room, this isn’t my bed _ is a little lessened.  _ These aren’t my clothes _ is a rarer one for her to run into, though, and that’s what pulls her the rest of the way out of unconsciousness.

Dick, as it turns out, is an absolutely obscene blanket hog; he’s nearly pulled the sheets off of the bed in his bid to turn himself into a six-foot-something burrito of warmth and cuteness. Good thing Harley has a habit of transforming into a were-koala when she sleeps, or she would have awakened in the middle of the night a lot more than she actually did.

Actually, she doesn’t remember waking up at all. So either it was just for a few seconds at a time or she just… didn’t. Huh.

She opens her eyes and ends up with a shoulder covering almost her entire field of vision. Dick ended up mostly on his back at some point, one arm flopping out across half the mattress and the other one draped over her torso. She has no idea what their legs are doing, and probably won’t be able to figure it out unless she disentangles all the bedclothes first. Which is going to be absolutely impossible without trying to get up altogether, so she won’t stress herself about it too much, but… damn it, she’s  _ super  _ confused.

Harley tries her best to stay still, but at some point, she shifts enough for Dick to apparently notice. “Hey,” he says. His voice is not the voice of a man who only just woke up.

She pushes herself up on her forearms so she can look at him. He’s adorably rumpled, his hair an absolute mess with the way it was plastered across the pillow as he slept with it wet. She is reasonably sure that he’s the prettiest thing to look at in the known universe. Probably the unknown universe as well.

She is absolutely sure that she’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Maybe not to the death—would probably set her back on the whole redeeming herself for past crimes thing—but pretty close to it, at least.

“Hey,” she says. “Been awake long?”

He does his best to shrug without messing up her balance. “A few minutes,” he says. “Didn’t want to wake you.”

“I wouldn’t have minded, dumbass.” She flicks his nose with her fingertip.

Dick wrinkles said nose in response. “And I didn’t mind staying still,” he returns. “Not a bad thing to look at. …Not that I was just sitting here watching you sleep,” he adds quickly. “Not much, I mean. It’s hard not to look at you when you’re…” He gestures vaguely to his entire body—and, by extension, hers.

Harley grins. Kissing him before anyone’s brushed their teeth feels like a bad plan, so she goes for his cheek instead. “You can watch me sleep all you want,” she says. “As long as you’re in the bed  _ with _ me and not across the street with a pair of binoculars, okay?”

His laugh shakes in her chest. “Okay,” he says.

* * *

Their first actual date starts at the suspicious-looking diner where they got food on their first accidental patrol together, and it ends with both of them sprawled out on his ridiculous couch, neither of them actually watching whatever the television’s playing.

He does most of the talking, this time. He’s a cop by day, she learns—and immediately has to take a few minutes’ break just to laugh and process that, because A. fighting crime during the night just wasn’t good enough for him yet, apparently, and B. of all the people she could  _ possibly _ fall for…

His family and the Bat family have almost perfect overlap, with Oracle seemingly being the only exception. He’s quick to assure her that Bruce’s habit of adopting sad and/or angry orphans wasn’t exclusively just to cultivate reasonable cover stories for the ever-growing string of Robins and Batgirls (there appears to have only ever been one Bat _ woman _ , and she’s the only one of them who’s actually related to Bruce by blood, so apparently the stubbornness is a family trait even outside of Batman’s parenting); the crime-fighting is usually an afterthought.

“He didn’t want me involved at all, at first,” he says.

“What changed his mind?”

Dick smiles awkwardly at his fries. “I tried solving my parents’ murder on my own,” he says. “I guess he figured if I was going to do it anyway…”

“It’d be safer with supervision?” Harley grins at him. “You know, Dick, that’s usually how most kids start  _ drinking _ . Not dressing up in tights and fighting crime.”

“You like the tights.”

“ _ So _ not the point, Dick.”

He seems physically incapable of saying anything more than affectionately annoyed about any of his family, which is a little weird, because the distance between her mom’s place and Gotham isn’t that much longer than the distance between Gotham and Blüdhaven, and she kind of assumed there’d have to be a similar reasoning for it. As nice as Batman is when you’re not actively crime-ing at him, he feels way too uptight to be easy to live with.

But then, the rest of them are all still lurking around Gotham, right? Maybe it was just Dick. Or maybe she’s reading too much into it. Either way, she’s not going to ask. Bad first date material, probably.

Which is why, when it starts looking like it’s her turn to talk, she talks about her granny instead.

* * *

You  
[6.48 PM] So  
[6.48 PM] If you knew somebody who was moving to Bludhaven for work  
[6.49 PM] Hypothetically

NERD ♥ (ICE)  
[6.49 PM] hypothetically?  
[6.50 PM] they could crash on my couch while they tried apartment hunting

You  
[6.51 PM] What if your bed is comfier

NERD ♥ (ICE)  
[6.51 PM] it’s my bed, not theirs  
[6.51 PM] you can borrow it though  
[6.51 PM] hypothetically.

You  
[6.52 PM] Asking a girl to move in a week after your first date huh

NERD ♥ (ICE)  
[6.52 PM] offering to let my girlfriend stay with me while she figures out where she wants to live  
[6.53 PM] after only having been on one NORMAL date  
[6.53 PM] due to both of us having really weird hobbies and not because we only just met  
[6.54 PM] there’s a difference

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE MORE, GUYS. I MEAN IT THIS TIME
> 
> shout-out to LordVitya/Protodan as usual~


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue, in which everyone gets their shit together and everything is happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that does say 8 of 8. It finally happened.
> 
> On the one hand, I'm sorry. On the other hand... this was supposed to be a oneshot the whole time and now it's LITERALLY novel-length. ?????
> 
> Further notes and a question on whether anyone has any preferences for what the next thing I do in this pairing is gonna be at the end! :D

There’s not a whole lot of stuff she actually cares about. She burns her rejection letters (and her acceptance letters to all the shit that pisses her off just to consider) in a trash can in the alleyway. She breaks out the spray paint one last time, scrawls _Thanks for everything, Bats_ on her own roof in solid red, signs it with her new sigil.

Harley takes her sewing machine and her clothes. She doesn’t have anywhere convenient to keep the mattress and she honestly doesn’t know how old it is anyway, so she leaves that. Books, legal paperwork crap, the two vibrators she actually likes, she also packs. She almost leaves her collection of Harley Quinn-related outfits, but hell, Dick would probably be into some weird supervillain roleplay, and she’d definitely be into the concept of debriding all the old associations she still has with the costumes from her head and forcefully repurposing them, if not redeeming them outright. She might not ever have a reason to wear them outside again apart from Halloween parties, but it wasn’t all bad. Maybe eventually she’ll be able to only remember the good parts.

Everything else, she leaves behind.

She doesn’t look like somebody moving three hours away and she knows it. Hell, she’s seen people dragging around more stuff in the airport for a two-hour flight. Probably for the best, though.

If only because it makes her look a _fraction_ less ridiculous when Bruce Wayne pulls over on the street next to her and rolls down the window.

“Dr. Quinzel?” he asks.

She hesitates. “Uh,” she says. “Technically, I guess?” Hell, Harley’s not even totally sure how the whole being-stripped-of-all-official-certification thing works with her diploma, and she’s the one in the middle of it. Bruce Wayne always struck her as being smarter than he let people think (he wouldn’t have had any power over his company at all if he was _completely_ incompetent, right?), even before she found out that he was also secretly Batman, but… still. Explaining it to him doesn’t sound like her idea of a good time. Especially if he’s being in character and he feels like being obnoxious today.

He doesn’t ask. He just smiles at her, wide and (seemingly) genuine. “Need a lift?”

Harley looks at her smallish flock of rolling suitcases. “Yeah,” she says.

* * *

It’s Batman. She knows it’s Batman.

The jury is very much out on whether that makes this more weird or less. She doesn’t even know what to _say_ ; she had thought about sticking around in Gotham just long enough to say her goodbyes in person, sure, but she just wanted to get on the road in the end. Everything she really needed to say is graffitied back behind them. Without that, there’s just…

Well, there’s mostly just awkward silence. Or awkward mostly-silence, anyway; Bruce keeps humming something under his breath, even though he doesn’t reach for the radio or anything. And that just kind of makes everything a little bit weirder, gives her another weird disconnect between what’s happening and what she knows, because she can’t imagine Batman doing anything but looming and saying important and/or dramatic and/or serious things, and he’s sitting next to her doing an impromptu drum solo with his thumbs on the steering wheel. It’s messing with every sense of reality she could possibly have developed.

They make it onto the highway in dead silence before Harley finally just decides to ignore everything that doesn’t make sense at the time. “So is this all a big coincidence or am I gonna have to worry about you guys tracking my phone all the time?” Which is… not exactly the best icebreaker she’s ever come up with before, but hell, it’s not like they’re actually mostly-strangers. He should be used to this kind of crap from her by now.

(It’s just _weird_ when he’s in normal people clothes. Very nice normal people clothes, with a scarf and everything, but normal people clothes nonetheless.)

Bruce’s mouth twitches, which is much more reassuring to her than the actual smile it turns into a second later. Okay, she thinks. He’s still in there somewhere. That’s good.

“Neither,” he says. “Dick told me you’d probably be heading out around now. I thought I’d check to see if you needed anything, and I ended up running into you a little earlier than expected.”

That begs the question as to how _Dick_ knew exactly when she was leaving, but she’s probably overthinking that. She’d been sending him progress updates since… god, since before she even started packing.

He’s a detective. …which is actually a really, really funny thought now that she knows his day job.

“Right,” she says. “Thanks, I guess. I mean—” Harley pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, tries to think through the tangle of _weirdness_ that she has to deal with right now. “Thanks,” she finishes.

“You said that.” He sounds—no, he just straight-up is amused. Or he’s a really good actor who’s choosing to act at this particular second because… he’s Batman and that’s just what he does? He doesn’t come with an off switch and has to pretend through every single second of his whole life, unless you’re one of six people?

(Are there more than six of them? Dick took her through his entire damn family the other day and she’s pretty sure she’s forgetting a few. It’s a lot easier to remember this crap when you don’t care.)

Bruce clears his throat. “I hear you’ll be staying with him,” he says. Someone zooms from the far left lane all the way across the highway and into the exit without signaling. Harley half expects him to start chasing the guy down (as if his own driving leaves much room for criticism, but she supposes he _technically_ tries to keep a lid on the reckless endangerment around civilians), but the only sign of his disapproval is the slight tightening of his jawline.

Unless the disapproval is for what he just said, but he’d probably have said something about it by now if he wasn’t okay with it, right? Hell, he probably would have showed up in full gear. Or thrown a batarang through her window again and then intimidated the everliving crap out of her. Point is, she’d know.

Right?

“It’s just temporary?” she offers.

He waves a hand dismissively. “I don’t care about that, Dr. Quinzel. I’m not about to bring out the shotgun and interrogate you about your intentions.”

Harley tries to imagine Batman with a shotgun. It just doesn’t work out. She snorts a giggle. “I’d like to see that,” she says. “You know, with somebody else. From a distance.”

“Unfortunately for you, Dick seems to have some of the fewest bad habits. And he’s more than capable of doing his own intimidation.”

“Damn right he is,” she says, a little dreamily, just before she remembers that that’s probably… crossing at least half a line. Somewhere.

Bruce gives her a look that balances on the border between entertained and exhausted.

“Sorry,” Harley says, and mostly means it.

“My point is,” Bruce says with utter and complete dignity, “it doesn’t matter to me as long as he’s happy. Both of you.”

Harley gives him a suspicious look. “You’re not gonna start inviting me over to Thanksgiving or whatever, right?”

He grins. “That depends.”

“On?”

“On whether you survive all of the holidays between now and then.”

“I can survive an awful lot, you know,” Harley says, feeling incomprehensibly that this is a challenge.

“Good,” he says cheerfully. “You and Jason will have a lot in common.”

* * *

Bruce parallel parks beautifully on the street outside, in blatant defiance of everything Harley had previously known or assumed about his driving skills, just as Dick opens the door and trots down the four steps to the sidewalk. He does not seem even remotely surprised to see either of them, which pretty much confirms her theory that he set all of this up from even before when Bruce said he had. Hard to mind too much when it means that she doesn’t have to drag all of her crap up the stairs herself—doesn’t have to drag much of it up at all, actually, because Bruce gets out to help too. And that’s… yeah, that’s just a little bit weird, but she’ll take it.

“Hey, Bruce,” Dick says.

“Dick,” Bruce answers, clapping Dick on the shoulder as he passes by. “I was hoping you’d introduce me to your girlfriend yourself, you know.”

Dick coughs out a chuckle. “Sorry,” he says. “Was pretty sure you’d already met.”

This is what her life is now, Harley thinks. This is just… what it’s going to be like.

(It’s not so bad.)

* * *

A month passes. Harley should look a little harder than she is, but in her defense, it’s not like Dick is doing much either. He’s just a little better at pretending that he is.

There’s an open apartment in his building, two floors down. Close enough that she can’t start pining, but there’s still distance there if she needs it, if she starts to freak out or if they have a fight (like she’s learning that normal couples do, or re-learning, her entire education being brought back out and proven correct) or she just wants to be left alone for a little bit. She’s still thinking about it.

Truth is that she hasn’t… wanted space. She always knew she was one hell of a clinger, but it’s not like Dick seems to actually _mind_ it. There’s a little bit of an adjustment period, just trying to figure out who does what and how thoroughly they need to be labeling their food, but it’s not as bad as she was afraid it was going to be.

(Except for the nagging little worry that _Dick_ is the one who needs space, and he’s just super good at hiding it, and it’s not so much that he’s not looking too hard for a different place for her to stay as it is that he’s just not finding anything, and—)

But she’s getting better. It’s not that bad.

The show still needs to go through a lot of stuff before much of anything can happen, but the meetings don’t feel like interrogations, and while nobody seems exactly at ease around her at first, nobody’s unfriendly. It kind of makes her wonder if this isn’t the first time that Bruce has done this—found ex-villains who looked like they were likely prospects for going straight and shuffled them off into some job or another in his own company that could keep them distracted enough to do it. She hopes so. Makes her feel a little better if she’s not just an experiment of some kind.

But Dick. Dick is the best part of everything.

(She doesn’t even remember what their first fight is about two days after it happens. And it’s not like she hasn’t had any conflicts with anyone she was _ever_ with that didn’t end in tears or threats or criminal rampages or whatever—hell, she and Pam had some real rough arguments that they’d survived, relationship intact, before it finally just stopped working out—but it’s… She had felt the world slipping a little to the side, maybe because it was a _guy_ she cared about and as far from the Joker as Dick is even at his worst there’s no accounting for what C-PTSD does to a person. So she’d shut down, and she’d holed up, and he’d let her be but he didn’t _leave_ , waited for her to come back out of the bedroom that was technically his and then just wordlessly offered her ice cream and let her work herself through it without a word. He’d just… he’d known. And he hadn’t blamed her or scoffed or thought it was silly, or at least had hidden it well. She hadn’t considered…)

Harley thinks she might love him. She knows for an absolute fact that she _could_.

She also knows it wouldn’t be a bad idea. The only problem with it is figuring out a way to let him know.

* * *

The sun is setting. They leave together through the window, grapnel up to the opposing roof. Nightwing looks at the sky for a second, opens his mouth a fraction of an inch before he closes it and swallows.

“Hey,” Harley says, nudging him gently. “Bird got your tongue?”

He looks down at her like he’s startled, and then grins. “Not right now,” he says.

It’s so stupid that she has to roll her eyes, which means that she almost misses his face when he comes out with the non sequitur to end them all.

“Love you, Harl,” he says, and takes a step back off the roof and into nothingness.

It takes her two seconds to unfreeze. By that point, Nightwing is already a street away, rolling gracefully when he hits the roof and taking off.

She laughs, startles herself with it, startles herself with the entire fucking supernova that goes off inside her bones. “Ohh no you don’t,” she mutters to herself, smiling so much it actually hurts, and she pulls her own grapnel out and chases after him.

It takes her a couple of minutes to catch up and she’s pretty sure it’s because he _wants_ to be caught; he’s showing off, going for flash and showmanship instead of pure speed (and she can tell he grew up in the circus, the stagecraft in every move he makes), until she finally throws herself at him in an alleyway and slams his back up against the wall. She’s still smiling. So is he. They’re both breathing hard, him a little less than her, and she decides to try and make him catch up by kissing him as hard as she can.

It backfires, of course. She doesn’t care.

“Love you too,” she says, laughing against his mouth. “Dork.”

Dick snorts, kissing her forehead and pulling her close. “That’s not my name,” he says.

“Oh, shut _up_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY!
> 
> Firstly, I know I've said this before, but seriously, thank all of you who commented or left kudos or bookmarked or even just read this in the first place. I was honestly expecting nobody to even notice this fic existed, so the fact that it got feedback at all is so awesome. I love all of you.
> 
> I have two actual ideas rattling around a bit; one of them is unfortunately one _hell_ of an endeavor and the ship part would be in the background, the other one... would probably end up being one by accident, but it at least looks like it could be reasonable. Maybe.
> 
> 1\. Actual, intentional redemption arc, set in a universe that is an ungodly amalgamation of every DC timeline I've ever actually paid attention to and not in any specific one. Fake Dating would be involved, but as background; focus would be redemption arc. TL;DR: Robin!Harley, because Batman cannot control himself around sad-looking people with either dead or dead-to-them parents.
> 
> 2\. Incredibly dumb fic set in a modified cinematic universe (because I refuse to acknowledge Jared Leto as canon), mostly Dick's POV this time, written half on a dare in tandem with a similar fic in the works on Protodan's end. Main modifications to cinematic stuff would be swapping Jared Leto out for an actual Joker (literally any of them. I don't care. holy shit.) with VERY VERY SMALL hat nods to whatever Protodan is doing at the time. TL;DR: Tinder AU.
> 
> I am also leaving options open for anything y'all suggest because I like being prompted for things anyway! And obviously the above are for multi-chapter (or things that I acknowledge will be multi-chapter) things; oneshots are altogether different. I just haven't had anything oneshot-y lurking about in my brain lately. But, again, if y'all have suggestions... :D
> 
> Anyway. Let me know if there are any preferences, etc.; and if you like, when I do post something, I'll hit you with a comment reply to let you know.
> 
> Thank you again for everything and I hope you all have a wonderful day. Bless. <3


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